I had a bunch (5500) of contacts on an old Sprint (Palm) Treo 650 I wanted to move to my Blackberry Bold. I bought a Sprint (Palm) 800w since buying the 650, but never copied the contacts from my 650 to 800. I took both phones to the local Sprint store and they acted like I was giving them some Herculean task to perform. I never got around to trying it myself, but now I don't have a reason to copy them from Treo to newer Treo anymore. I started working for Blackberry support recently, and now have use of a Blackberry Bold. My task became copying my Treo 650 contacts to my Blackberry Bold contacts.
The 650 runs Palm OS, and is managed best with Desktop Manager 6.2 and HotSync (now available at http://kb.hpwebos.com/wps/portal/kb/common/article/32859_en.html#windows ). There are plenty of instructions on the Internet on how to synch your Palm contacts with Outlook (I did this on my XP system, Caprica, and used Outlook Express). Here are some instructions from eHow:
Once your contacts have been sync'd with Outlook you can export them to a csv file. Once again there are plenty of tutorials on how to do this on the Internet, but here's one from Microsoft for Outlook 2010 (there are plenty of others for Outlook Express, Outlook 2003, etc.):
Next you need to import this csv file into an Access database. Any RDBMS will do, but we are working with MS technology here, so Access. Here's another tutorial page:
Now that we have a relational database table we can use SQL commands to get rid of duplicates. Our data can be a real mish mosh, so we can't use SQL predicates like UNIQUE or DISTINCT (feel free to look up what that means). We can group our data by all of the attributes per row too get unique rows. This is what it looks like after building a query in MS Access:
SELECT [Field1], [Field2], [Field3], [Field4], [Field5], [Field6], [Field7], [Field8],
There are also plenty of tutorials on the Internet for creating queries with MS Access. The following is for using the query wizard. After creating the query, view it as a SQL query and modify it as I did in the above code:
Click on File and save as a csv file. This csv file consists of unique records. It can be imported into Outlook (create a new profile so you don't just create more duplicates in your old profile). Then startup the Blackberry desktop software on your PC and sync the Outlook contacts with your Blackberry. If you already have duplicates on your Blackberry, like I did, then you can use the BB desktop software to delete the contacts off of your Blackberry first. I went from 5500 down to 1000 contacts; i.e., I got rid of 4500 duplicates (multiplicates?). I didn't add any more detail this blog when I got to creating the csv file, because it's 3 AM I need to get to sleep.