Gwhiz

I’m going to India for a few weeks and I was actually scheduled to be on the same flight as my buddy Utpal until he had to delay his trip – only in New York, as they say, or, in the this case, only in New Delhi. In any case, I need to bring my address book with me because I will actually be offline for DAYS at a time. Trouble is, all of my contacts are in Gmail. I’m completely Outlook free at home – my name is Zachary and I was an Outlook user for years – so now I do everything via Gmail. The one weak link in the Google mini-dynasty of email, calendars, spreadsheets, word processing and more is their address book program. It’s a complete afterthought and has a lousy UI, doesn’t allow for categorizing, and is basically as simplistic as possible. This works well for remembering email addresses, but not for organizing your life. As an EM, I like to be organized.

I hunted around Google and couldn’t find a way to natively print my contacts in a readable format. What to do? Based on advice from a posting, I exported Google to a CSV, opened it in Excel (note, not Google’s Spreadsheet program!), and formatted away until I have a barely usable, printable address book. I had to alphabetize by first names since there is no separate field for Last Name, and I had to shrink the font to a size that is best described as really wicked crazy small. My colleague Daniel Modell pointed out that I also had to waste 30 pages of paper. Yikes.

Google’s plans for interstellar conquest probably won’t be delayed by more than a few nanoseconds by this usability blip, but I’d appreciate a bit more attention to detail as they take on Microsoft. Or turn into Microsoft. We’ll see.

Zachary Thacher