Trying to clean up my contacts. Google is my choice for my contact management. Tried to delete all my contacts and start from scratch. I downloaded all my contacts to excel. Dislike all the hide options. Deleting all contacts is impossible. Began to realize all the duplicate contacts are not in the account I think I am looking at. The contact info is from other sources plus the the contact set I believe I am in. Finally understand the contact data I see is fluid. My google acct page has a (people and sharing) This has the settings for the data I see when i am looking at my google contacts. Think “normals” have little knowledge of people in their google contacts. The way I used to think this data was the contacts I enter are the base and as suggestions occur that data remains and suggestions are added to that base. My contacts are a mess. When accessing my contacts the data I see depends on my device and the account I am using. After deleting all my google contacts several days ago I added by hand 6 contacts. Went back to my Google contacts Now, days later, those contacts changed. Some had no email and phone only. This happened before I changed the Google (people and Sharing) settings. Want one data set that only changes when I make a change. Hope changing the Google people and sharing does that. Does anyone know how to keep a base set and only see changes from other sources as an option.
Let me know if you figure this out.
Will try, so confusing. Do not know how other people manage contacts. One friend only uses a single device for email and another for phone. My biggest concern is possibility of being hacked and never knowing. When you combine this confusion with the fact when enter a name in email or text, the detail of that where it is going is hidden.
I tried this when I was all in with Google; when I was all in with Microsoft; when I was all in with Apple. It has never worked. I’ve given up on the idea a clean set of contacts and no longer care. I just go into messages or mail or phone and start typing until it fills in the right person. If I had to maintain or manage a contact list for professional reasons I might give it another go, but I’ve learned to pick my battles.
Same here! I’ve had the same problem for ages (and still have it) but am slowly finding new approaches, I believe.
Originally, I was with Google contacts since I use Android and my contacts usually started with a phone number. Since I don’t delete but simply archive emails, I can restore email addresses, but not phone numbers if someone tells me his/hers.
I learned that things were too fluid for my liking. Everything tries to sync everywhere and with everything, leading to a big mess. Also, it becomes obscure where some data lies. Some things were stored on the phone and got lost when resetting, creating a huge pain of “new phone who dis?”.
What I am trying/doing now is using the reasonably separate but connected and not willing to spill my data anywhere solution of NextCloud (a local Dropbox clone which also does contacts via CardDAV) to store but not proactively sync all my contacts. So that’s my repository. I can access that from my phone via CardDAV plugin and from Thunderbird via CardBook plugin.
My process then is to use Thunderbird for a while, say two or three months. Thunderbird collects email addresses that I send mails to as a default. After a certain time, I go into CardBook and take all automatically collected sent to email addresses and move them to my next cloud address book. There, I sort, categorise, and beautify them a bit and voila, I have a good contacts list. I don’t do that continuously, just every once in a while. Since these addresses then are known, they will (hopefully) not get collected again. Otherwise, the quarterly step will be a matter of merging.
It’s one of the big challenges that remain unsolved, for sure. Contact management and, especially, syncing. Good luck! 
Still looking for a solution. One observation is the use of labels and merging affects contacts. I tried to delete all my contacts and start over. (contacts never disappear they are just hidden from view) Started entering people with just a name and entering data by hand and not merging anything. Did this with a few contacts. Those contacts stayed as I entered. Google picked up my history each and added that to those contacts but did not add all the other emails addresses or other data. Makes me think that the more you merge and combine contacts the worse the outcome. When my husband retired it took me 2 years to delete his business email. Google kept using the old email from history. As you only see the persons name in your email was a huge problem.
Sadly, this is my experience as well. 
The rule seems to be: the more important the contact, the less “smart” the contact management should be. If it thinks it’s smart, it will try to do something to screw it up.
We are now encouraged to “hide” our email by using a different email address on IOS. Does this give access to all my contacts from both emails? Or is there a way to use multiple domaines and not share all the contacts with both companies? Google, Microsoft and Apple seem to “sync” contacts between companies.
What does this mean exactly?
“Hide My Email allows apps to contact you without receiving your real email address. This unique address only works with email from this developer.”
Did not completely understand this. The quote is from the settings on IOS ON MY iPad. Am trying to understand how contacts work.
The site/app basically gets a random Apple email address. Any email the site sends to you gets forwarded to whatever email address is set as your Apple ID.
This may be part of my problem. After reading this I am trying to see how to turn this off. Think this may be very helpful to understand why I have constant problems. Think I have already reset a few accounts that I used apple account to sign in. Does anyone know if this complicates IOS in app purchases.
This has nothing to do with Contacts.
I always use this 
This summer was challenging.The biggest problem was Microsoft. I had an old outlook address that I changed with my new laptop. Also one email was hacked. I spent months trying straighten everything out. I made mistakes trying to fix this mess. Have worked with Dell and others to recover from this. I started to pay for Drop Box thru IOS and first thought the “hide” email caused part of the problem. The settings are so difficult to understand. Thanks for your help.
Change who’s saved & suggested as contacts
You’ll see contacts suggested in some Google services, like when you start typing someone’s name in a new email in Gmail. You can control who gets saved and suggested as a contact
This looks like it is helpful.