Error syncing contacts on Android phone (Samsung Note 3)

The only solution I found to work is the following:

 1. On my PC, in gmail, export all contacts to a file, google.csv, and put it someplace on my PC.
2. Delete all contacts in my phone.
3. Delete all contacts in my gmail account from my PC.
4. Manually add one contact from my PC. It synched OK to my phone.
5. Modify that contact on my phone. It synched OK back to my contacts, at my PC.
6. Import the google.csv file back into contacts, at my PC.
All contacts thereafter synched OK again in both directions.

This took me a day to stumble upon. I tried umpteen other things first, including Contacts Sync Fix from Playstore, with no luck.
I recently adopted Android, and imported about 250 contacts from My Microsoft Outlook application. My guess is that something is not translating, and corrupts the database.
If this recurs, I will try methodically to isolate a particular Contacts record, perhaps with some odd special characters, to find an offending contact.

Thanks SkiBumRuss on Android central!