How can I change the order of email-addresses in Google Contacts?

Question

I have many contacts in Google Contacts with more than one email address, and I'd prefer to order them in a certain manner. Short of copy and pasting all of them, is there a drag-and-drop feature of some sort to change the list of contacts?

Answer 1

There is no such thing yet, but in order to speed up the process you can do the following.

For example if you have 5 e-mails for one contact.

1. Add 5 new empty e-mail fields
2. Click on the first e-mail and then press Ctrl+A to select all and Ctrl+X to cut the selection
3. Click on the first empty field and Ctrl+V to paste
4. Continue with the rest
5. Don't delete the empty fields, they will be removed automatically once you hit the save button

(If you are on a mac use Cmd instead of Ctrl)

Answer 2

There is a relatively elegant way to choose the first address in the list, but it doesn't allow to change the order of all email addresses.

On a suitable mobile device, open Google Contacts. Open the contact, and long-press the email-address you want to have on top. Click "Set default".

What happens: the new default address appears on top, but Google Contacts will remember the original order. Specifically:

• On your mobile device, the default address appears on top when you view the contact, but in editing mode, the order hasn't changed.
• In the desktop version, the default address appears on top both in the view and edit mode. However, when you now set another email address as the default; the previous default will not be the second in the list; it will be where it was originally.

In summary, you can only change the first address in the list.

Tested with a Huawei P-series device running on Android.

Answer 3

I had a problem where NOTHING worked. When I tried reordering the email addresses were reordered in apparently random ways and I couldn't figure out the pattern of what worked. I could never get it right.

The problem was that there were 2 contacts with the same name. Google apparently merges multiple contacts together when displaying them in such a way that reordering doesn't work properly.

The solution was to copy all the information from the second contact to the first and then delete the second contact. Edits to the remaining contact then worked correctly.

Answer 4

Another solution would be to export and import:

1. Move the contacts into a temporary group.
2. Export only this group of contacts as csv
3. Delete the contacts in the group
4. Modify the csv file
5. Import the contacts

This isn't really practical, but if you have hundreds of contacts to modify, it would be much easier to automate it using a csv file rather than copy/paste.