Outlook for Android Questions

[David_H]

1. First the silliest question of the day - is there anyplace users can go anymore to find a FULL online help manual for a product? Not isolated help articles based on a search, but an actual manual that allows you to see information on every setting in the app?

2. No matter what I do, under People, the app shows ALL the people following me on Google +. Not even people I follow, but people that follow me! Just what I need, an extra thousand people in my contacts list. Is there any way to turn this off? I despise this continual dumbing down of products to make them "convenient", and making absurd choices for users in the process, if I wanted someone to show up, I'd have entered them! Rant off .

3. There is a setting that says "sync contacts from this account". As far as I can see, the only affect of this setting is to make my Outlook contacts also show up in the Android contacts app. Is this correct?

Thanks in advance for responses!

 

[Diane Poremsky]

1. No, not really.
2. I don't think so, short of removing the google account, but i will look into it.
3. Yes. Prior to the addition of that option, you needed to add the account in the android app and turn off mail & calendar sync to be able to use the contacts to make a call.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Ok... it looks like you can turn off circles in Gmail contacts "all contacts" list (at Google Contacts) , but are you sure you're seeing followers and not addresses of people who sent you email? The hot new feature in many mail apps is returning a list of people who recently sent you email - the Outlook app does that too.

 

[David_H]

Thanks for your responses Diane!

Re: # 3, just to be sure, it will NOT cause phone (only) contacts to sync back into Outlook/Exchange, correct?

Ok... it looks like you can turn off circles in Gmail contacts "all contacts" list (at Google Contacts) , but are you sure you're seeing followers and not addresses of people who sent you email?

I'm absolutely positive they are followers, because I no longer use G+ and don't follow anyone. That's one of the reasons it's so irritating to see a thousand people showing up in my contacts that I don't even know. I also have circles turned off in G+ (see imgur screenshot below). So it seems to me that Outlook is using its permissions to pull all my followers off G+ and stick them into my Contacts. Very bad form.

Imgur: The most awesome images on the Internet

 

[Diane Poremsky]

if you don't want any google contacts listed, you can turn them off in settings (it's under google).

 

[Diane Poremsky]

No, it won't sync your other contacts back to your Exchange account. They are combined on the device only.

It looks like the outlook app will pick up contacts from every app that shared with the default people app.

 

[David_H]

It looks like the outlook app will pick up contacts from every app that shared with the default people app.

But that's the thing, even the default Android Contacts app does Not show them. So it may be providing some type of "hook" that Outlook is pulling them from, but it knows better than to add all those people to my contacts.

But....that bit of information gave me the key to fixing the issue. I went into the app settings (on Android, NOT the Outlook app) and was able to modify permissions and deny the Outlook app access to the phones contacts. Voila, now the followers don't show up in Outlook.

Thanks as always Diane.

 

[David_H]

Edit: for anyone else who finds this thread due to the same issue, cancel what I said above. Turning off the permissions DID work, but at the expense of losing the ability to sync the contacts in Outlook to the phones Contact app.

 

[Diane Poremsky]

Shucks... i was hoping that would get rid of the extra contacts i have in Outlook that are not in the account I have configured in Outlook and I can't figure out which mail app has them. (I have a lot of mail apps for testing. )