How to manage my phone contacts on the cloud efficiently?

Be it an android, apple or windows, backups are always necessary. Most of us want to change our mobile phone as often as possible to ensure we are in touch with technology and apps. Some of us even do it as a hobby. Contacts are always a growing list and managing them through various devices can be a task. 

We also have different options on every smartphone to sync our contacts on to the cloud. iCloud is a great way to store iPhone contacts. Gmail is awesome for android users. Microsoft uses Sky Drive and Outlook.com. The big players in the market have their own solutions to creating back-up of contacts. There are great apps in the marketplace that provide ways to have a backup in the cloud.

The problem over here is to manage contacts on the cloud efficiently. Cloud is a cool place to store data. But when we have a growing list of data, how can we manage it.

Mobile companies are pushing their sales in every possible way to stay on top of the market. The tables show the sales on mobiles to end users in Q3 2013 and who are the players in the market. (Taken from http://www.ibtimes.com/worldwide-smartphone-sales-q3-2013-samsung-android-maintain-lead-apples-market-share-slips-1471754)

These days, sticking on to one brand becomes questionable as the choices we have are more. Managing contacts on the cloud can be ineffective if we choose to keep changing our phones from different brands every two years or less than that.

Move Contacts on to Online Spreadsheet.

As mentioned earlier, Contacts are a growing list and all mobile phones can import contacts from a .csv format file. If we use online tools such as Google Docs, Zoho Docs, Office 365, CollateBox, EditGrid, etc. the contacts are always available on the cloud and easily downloadable. They are also downloadable in a CSV format which is a common factor for importing contacts. We may not be able to sync our contacts directly from the mobile devices but there are options to add and retrieve the data from the online lists. Sharing, web link, embedding of sheet or online forms are ways to add or update contacts to the spreadsheets. CollateBox has an interesting feature of notifying the user through mail or sms when changes to the lists are made. Irrespective of which device we use or what brand we prefer, the data is safe and secure on a spreadsheet on the cloud.

Managing contacts on an online spreadsheet is safer than managing contacts on the device. If we apply filters on the contacts and share the sheet, the list can keep growing. The sheet can be updated without showing the other contacts by applying filters on it. Sharing can be done through a public url or a web link can be posted on any website or social media site. Think about it and try it.