What's the best way to resolve duplicate contacts and batch edit?

Question

Hi.
I need some advice. I want to consolidate my contacts, remove duplicates, add tags, and then sync them across applications (Addresbook, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, etc.) going forward. I'm finding many challenges and it seems there's not an easy way to do it.
Addressbook
* will not let you go through and review/edit/approve how it resolves duplicates
* manually finding/fixing duplicates is tedious - there's no drag and drop from one contact to the other
Yahoo Mail
* will let you review/edit duplicates
* has a tedious interface and requires importing/exporting files
* when adding a new contact doesn't always let one add a group
* no longer has a "find new contacts" feature that would auto populate new cards - so anyone's address that I rely on auto-fill from recent will not have a card yet
Gmail
* I don't have any contacts there yet.
Palm
I originally had all my contacts in Palm and there's a lot of old "X-Palm-Category1:" etc in the notes, which actually make good tags, but are hard to edit to something like "tag:business". I can if necessary try to use Palm desktop 4.
Bento
I have Bento 3 and I've tried using it to clean up some of my Addressbook contacts and start "tagging" my contacts to make searching easier. The problem there is that I can't find a way to batch process contacts. I also can't seem to add line breaks in the notes. So in Addressbook I can add  tag:123 and tag:456 on separate lines, but not in Bento so any AB card edited in Bento shows it as tag:123 tag:456 on one line
Excel 2004
I have exported most of these contacts into Excel spreadsheets. (Bento will export the Apple AB into a spreadsheet). Attempting to compile and clean data in spreadsheets has it's own set of issues. In particular, the data are not laid out in columns that can be easily copy pasted into one template. For example, Yahoo contacts allow the label for the phone number to vary for the phone column instead of putting home, work, fax, and mobile numbers in separate columns.
iPhone 4
I also have an iPhone but it oddly enough doesn't display any smart groups, and it doesn't even display the phone's default "unsorted" folder. I can only find a new contact added from the phone after syncing it back to the MBP and looking in a smart folder I made for it.
Other than hiring a data entry temp to fix this as a project, can anyone think of something that I could use/do to make this easier?
I would appreciate any and all suggestions.

Answer 1

I found out I sometimes have three or even four versions of the same file.
How did you find that out?