Address Book Power Tips

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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.

COMMENTS: 18

TAGS: how-to, create, Address Book

COMMENTS

facebook syncing
Submitted by mr100percent on Tue, 2009-09-15 11:24

There's even a few apps that will copy your friends' birthdays from facebook into the address book and iCal

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iCal - Birthday
Submitted by hawaiiinsomniac on Wed, 2009-09-16 00:49

I love having Birthdays filters into the calendar but its a shame that it can't be synched via MobileMe.

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10.6 Removed Some Address Book Shortcuts
Submitted by derekcbart on Mon, 2009-09-21 15:48

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.

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yes yes- same issue here -
Submitted by thejewishrapper on Wed, 2009-11-18 15:50

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.

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birthday and ages
Submitted by ginopiazza49 on Tue, 2009-09-22 16:58

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?

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Birthday dates
Submitted by william2a on Tue, 2009-10-06 00:01

Unfortunately, the field "show birthday" doesnn't appear in my iCal preferences. Does somebody have an idea?

William2a

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birthdays & auto fill
Submitted by julieisforlovers on Mon, 2009-11-02 03:31

thanks for the information about getting the birthdays into iCal and how to get the autofill. very helpful!

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omega watches
Submitted by benet (not verified) on Tue, 2009-11-10 18:32

Every little chat Salon 1000 ah!replica watchYou are my best's buddy
2fds

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esrhswg شات دردشه
Submitted by lovestar (not verified) on Fri, 2009-11-27 16:11

esrhswg شات دردشه شات كويتي دردشه كويتيه ، شات كويت60 شات كازنوفا شات سعودي شاات مصريه شات كويت25 شات دردشة دردشه 3rt3eg

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GGشات
Submitted by sami29 on Tue, 2009-12-01 20:46

GGشات فلسطيني شات مصري شات بنات بنت السعوديه شات بحريني شات ودردشة حدود العرب العاب شات صوت قطرFF

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keyboard shortcut to open page
Submitted by pvdmark on Mon, 2010-01-18 11:49

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.

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Address Book Power Tips
Submitted by Natalie Foley on Sat, 2010-01-30 04:05

It deals with the "Stickiness Factor".
Every so often an advertising campaign uses mass communication

Dating Advice

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Address Book Power Tips
Submitted by herbertlonsteins on Thu, 2010-02-04 03:05

I don't think anyone could do that, but is my be possible. Did you look in the All file or another folder? Data can be corrupted on the hard drive.

Dating Advice

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