Contacts not assigned to a group

Question

I've been working on getting my contacts and calendars synced up and going fairly well. Have a completely mixed environment: Outlook 2007, iPad IOS 7.1.2; Android phone and Macbook (10.6.8 but not in the current sync process).
What I've found after a lot of troubleshooting is that I have duplicate contacts and am trying to figure our how to find and remove them. Now before you just say search for them and remove one of the duplicates, the issue is more complex. First, I am very much a geek so know what I'm doing - that doesn't mean that I don't miss simple things now and again though but please don't assume I've not check to see if it's plugged in and turned on
I, like most I'd guess, prefer to keep my contacts grouped together. When I first setup the sync, everything was on the iPad as I had manually (wifi/USB) kept the iPad and Macbook synced. Simply setting up the iCloud sync from the iPad was simple enough and never really noticed any issues - doesn't mean it didn't start there though; just didn't see it.
In Outlook, there is a plugin for iCloud and I have that loaded with no problems. Contacts all came in and the groups all appear to work. If I create a new group in Outlook, I see it on the iPad and phone. If I delete it from the iPad, it's gone everywhere.
Now to where the duplicates are. When I look at the counts in Outlook - just because it's the easiest place to do it, the total contacts added up from all the groups is 626. The total contacts when I get the properties of the top level is 833
If I select the top level, I can see the duplicates, if I select the individual groups, there are none. I verified this on the iPad by manually selecting each group rather than the "All Contacts". Doing this, the duplicates are gone. So clearly, at least to me, what has happened is that there are 208 contacts (834-626) that are in iCloud but not assigned to a group. The problem is, I can't see them without selecting "All Contact" and at that point, I won't know which one I'd be deleting and would rather not delete the one that is currently and correctly assigned to the group.
Hope that gives someone enough details to give me some ideas. I've already though about manually exporting all of the groups one at a time and deleting them until all I have left is "All Contacts"/top level in Outlook and then deleting whatever is left and re-importing all of the groups but would rather not do that unless I have to. I'm guessing the biggest reason this is so hard is that the vCard standard did not fully support groups until v4.0 and Outlook is v2 or v3?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I'm not sure there is an easy way to do this.  In addition to the approach you mentioned of exporting the group contacts as vCards (which would probably involve importing them to Gmail so you could export an iCloud-compatible vCard), then deleting the remaining contacts and reimporting the vCards, another option would be to identify the duplicates in the All Contacts list and edit the name of one of each of the duplicate (by, for example, adding a "1" to the last name).  That would allow you to go through your groups and identify which one belongs to the group and which doesn't.  It would still be a tedious exercise though.