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Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting

Why are the "New Contact" and other buttons disabled?

This happens when no contact groups exist. You must first create at least one group in Groups entry in the sidebar. Once a group is created, you can proceed to add contacts to it.

Some phone numbers were truncated when data exported to an Excel file and converted to CSV. How can I fix this?

Excel often converts long numeric sequences (like phone numbers) into scientific notation (e.g., 112147483641 → 1.12147E+11), truncating the data.

To prevent this truncation before importing the CSV:

  1. Locate the affected phone numbers in your Excel file.
  2. Insert a single quote mark (') before the number in the cell (e.g., '112147483641). This forces Excel to treat the cell as text.
  3. Save the file as a CSV - the single quote characters will be retained.
  4. Re-import the data into EZ Contact Book. The program will ignore the single quotes.

Alternatively, you can try converting the scientific notation format in Excel before saving to CSV using these resources:

When syncing with Google, why are new contacts added daily?

If you use Gmail, your settings are likely configured to automatically add new email addresses as contacts whenever you communicate with someone new.

To disable this behavior:

My computer/hard drive crashed. How can I restore my contacts?

Your best recovery method depends on whether you used the Sync feature:

  • If you used Sync: Your contacts are safely backed up in your Google account. Simply install EZ Contact Book on your new system, log in to Google, and click Sync. This will restore all your contacts.

  • If you didn’t use Sync:

  1. Try to search for the main database file contacts.db on the old hard drive.
  2. If the main file is unavailable, look for the auto-backup files (CONTACTS_AUTO_BACKUP\_*.DB).
  3. If a backup file is found, restore the latest version using the instructions found here.

To restore corrupted or damaged database, see specific instructions on this page.