10/05/2014

Fritzbox Phonebook Connected to Google - How to Sort by Last Name


I found many posts on how this is not possible, but I desperately needed my FritzFon to sort contacts by last name instead of first name, so I did some research myself.

Here's what I found:
FritzBox only stores a single name field, they do not distinguish first and last names - so the only way to sort by last name is to enter contacts as "last name, first name".

Of course, when you connect your FritzBox to Google contacts, you need Google to deliver the names in this format. So where does FritzBox pick up the name from?

An experiment showed that even though Google does distinguish between first and last names (use "..." next to the full name to view these), it also saves something like a " display name" field.
If you enter names in the form "last name, first name" into Google, it sets the display name accordingly, and upon syncing to the FritzBox, you also get your contacts in this form there.

Problem solved? Not quite.

My problem was that I already had hundreds of contacts in there, and there was no way I would manually change each one of them. Here's how I ended up doing this in a semi-automated fashion:
  • in Google export all contacts in Outlook format, this creates a csv file
  • open the file in Excel, add a column named "Name" and enter a formula that creates the format that you like for the display name, then save as csv again
  • delete all contacts in Google and import said csv file
  • now all your contacts will have the correct format in their display name
  • for new contacts, make sure you enter them in this format
Finally, to make these changes visible on the FritzBox, I had to delete the phone book and re-establish the connection to Google. Syncing also did not do the trick, not sure why.

Afterwards, the contacts showed up in the desired sort order on my FritzFon.

@AVM: it is about time you updated your FritzBox to support different name fields to make this easier!

Addition, 7 June 2015: a year later, another problem arises
Recently (a week ago?) Google updated their APIs, since then I have an empty phone book, and when I update my configuration, I get something like "invalid username or password".
This is partly due to Google's lack of communication to developers. AVM will need to update the FritzOS to make it work again.
Now my FritzBox is out of warranty, and I don't think I will receive any update. So I finally decided to "unlink" my phone book from Google and import contacts instead. This was actually quite easy:
  • in Google mail, export your contacts in vCard format
  • download the Contact Conversion Wizard from here
  • in the wizard, import your vCard file and export in Fritzbox format
  • finally, in your FritzBox, "restore" the phone book from the generated file
This only takes 5 minutes.
I don't know how you feel about it, but I do prefer repeating this procedure twice a year rather than running into all the trouble I had before again.
Search term for German readers: Fritzbox Telefonbuch nach Nachname sortiere

2 comments:

Andisho said...

Hello!
Thank you!

I noticed that Fritz!Fon on Fritz!Box (7490) down't show contacts with "company" check box activated and no Lastname/Surename filled in, which we do regularly for bakery xyz etc.

Right now when I miss a contact in Fritz!Fon, I sigh and change the contact to company xyz with surename and lastname xyz duplicated, looks funny, but involves no csv list juggling...

The problem is probably the limited characters a phone has for the name field.
Since no one else is using display name, we are a bit alone in the marked.
Otherwise google would have thought of some clever way to manipulate display name for all or selcted contacts in the web api...

Thanks!

Andi

Andisho said...

Please discard my entry before, I corrected a Link to nv-systems.net (not .de)

Empty "Display Name" -> no contact in Fritz!Fon
(for company checkboxed contacts with empty names fields)


Hello!
Thank you!

I noticed that Fritz!Fon on Fritz!Box (7490) down't show contacts with "company" check box activated (in contacts of macOs, e.g.) and no Lastname/Surename filled in, which we do regularly for bakery xyz etc.

It seems that this causes an empty display name field...

Right now when I miss a contact in Fritz!Fon, I sigh and change the contact to company xyz with surename and lastname xyz duplicated, looks funny, but involves no csv list juggling...

The problem is probably the limited characters a phone has for the name field.
Since no one else is using display name, we are a bit alone in the marked.
Otherwise google would have thought of some clever way to manipulate display name for all or selcted contacts in the web api...

I would be highly pleased if some contacts manager app/program would give me a csv based view AND allowed me to juggle with regexp or other mighty text processing capabilities in a syncing way (with auto-backup of course), so I could just throw in the program and let it do the configured job, either running in background as an app on some phone, or starting it manually on a PC/mac some times per month. Perhaps one could write some script to do it with open office, using a spreadsheet at its heart that gets its fields from google contacts automatically.

A non-syncing tool is given by Contacts Conversion Tool, free of charge, by nv-systems.net

Thanks!

Andi

adaxas Web Directory