Address Book Power Tips
Squeeze more power out of Apple's quintessential contacts app.
Level: Easy
What You Need:
>Address Book (included in Mac OS X)
>About 20 minutes to tinker
Apple’s Address Book is a central part of the Mac experience. It’s integrated with Mail, iCal, iChat, Safari, Fax, Dashboard, and Spotlight. It synchronizes to MobileMe, iPhone, iPod, and a wide variety of third-party software and hardware.
Yet for such an essential tool, it’s curious that Apple has kept Address Book so bare-bones basic. At first glance, there’s not much power to eke out of Address Book, but we’ve collected a few handy tips to help you squeeze some extra functionality out of this vital application.
Note that many of these tips only work while viewing Address Book in “Card and Columns” view (View > Card And Columns).
Address Book can do more than you thought it could.
1. View Multiple Contacts
Instead of single-clicking a contact in Address Book, double-click on the contact to open up that card in its own window. You can do that for as many contacts as you’d like, for easy viewing and editing of multiple contacts.
Look at four contacts (or more) simultaneously with just a double-click.
2. Synchronize Birthdays
Address Book and iCal both contain hidden features that let you add a contact’s birthday to his or her Address Book record, and then that birthday will show up every year in iCal. In Address Book’s preferences, click the Template button in the toolbar, then select Birthday from the Add Field menu. That new Birthday field will now show up whenever you edit a contact’s record. In iCal’s preferences, click the General button in the toolbar and check the box for Show Birthdays Calendar. You’ve now created a special read-only Birthdays calendar in iCal that pulls all of the birthday data automatically from Address Book.
This hidden Birthday field will link your contacts' birthdays to iCal.
3. Create Custom Fields
If the default Address Book cards don’t have enough fields for all the info you want to collect for your contacts, head to the Template screen in Address Book’s preferences, and click Add Field to add additional fields onto all of your cards. You can also click the little green plus signs to add even more variations of the same type of fields.
Address Book also lets you create your own custom fields. On the same Preferences > Template screen, you can click on most of the field labels and select Custom, where you can name your very own custom fields that will appear on each card.
We've already added the custom fields Hours, Referred By, and Rates. You can add even more by choosing Custom from almost any field label.
Related Articles
pvdmark
January 18, 2010 at 11:49am
Is there a shortcut for opening the address book on the desktop? The program is open and the only way to open the book is by going up to the pull down named "window" and clicking "address book". What's up with that?
Thanks for the shortcuts. I never realized the options for large type, label and map. Great.
lovestar
November 27, 2009 at 4:11pm
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benet
November 10, 2009 at 6:32pm
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julieisforlovers
November 02, 2009 at 3:31am
thanks for the information about getting the birthdays into iCal and how to get the autofill. very helpful!
william2a
October 06, 2009 at 12:01am
Unfortunately, the field "show birthday" doesnn't appear in my iCal preferences. Does somebody have an idea?
William2a
ginopiazza49
September 22, 2009 at 4:58pm
Are there any Address Book plug ins that will calculate a persons age from the birthday field? I also know there are programs like GeburtstagsChecker and iBirthday X.Between those two programs, can you recommend one over the other?
derekcbart
September 21, 2009 at 3:48pm
Hello.I am generally happy with Mac OS 10.6, but the most useful Address Book editing feature was removed in the new version. In the previous version if you started to type text into a field and then click Function+F5 it would give you a pulldown menu of every entry used in that field. For example, you want to add "Account Manager" to a person's Job Title. You could start typing "acc" and then click Function+F5 and a pulldown menu would appear that included Account Manager (assuming that someone else in your address book already had this job title).This shortcut has been removed. Now when you click Function+F5 you still get a pulldown menu, but it appears to be coming from the Mac Dictionary and is totally worthless as a shortcut to enter previously entered job titles.Very frustrating. If you can find out how to do this shortcut again in the 10.6 version of Address Book I would be immensely happy.Thank you.
thejewishrapper
November 18, 2009 at 3:50pm
yes yes- same issue here - have you found a solution to the Fn-F5 drop down auto-fill shortcut? Also, SL really screwed up Address Book. It no longer copies all the data of the whole contact (only field by field) AND one can no longer highlight and copy a contacts web address - you actually have to go to the site and copy it from the Safari bar.
hawaiiinsomniac
September 16, 2009 at 12:49am
I love having Birthdays filters into the calendar but its a shame that it can't be synched via MobileMe.
mr100percent
September 15, 2009 at 11:24am
There's even a few apps that will copy your friends' birthdays from facebook into the address book and iCal
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