Address Book Power Tips

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4. See a Contact's Group

It’s easy enough to click on an Address Book group and see which contacts are part of that group. But what if you want to go the other way around and see which groups a particular contact belongs to? Simply hold down the Option key after you’ve selected the contact’s card, and Address Book will highlight all the groups that person is a part of.

Holding down Option shows us that this contact belongs to six groups.

5. Dial Your Phone

If you have a Bluetooth cell phone that supports this feature, first pair it with your Mac (go to System Preferences > Bluetooth, click the Plus sign for Set Up New Device, and follow the prompts). Then just click the label of a phone number on one of your address cards, choose Dial from the pop-up menu, and watch in amazement as your cell phone dials the phone number for you.

Our iPhone 3G doesn't support dialing over Bluetooth, but we could still dial this number in Skype.

6. Sort Your List with Smart Groups

Address Book doesn’t give you a way to see the creation date of your contacts. It also obscures the updated date if your notes extend beyond the window size. In either case, you can never sort your list by any other criteria except for First Name or Last Name. If you need a list of recently updated contacts, you can create a smart group (File > New Smart Group) where “Card has changed in (x number of days, weeks, months, etc).”

This Smart Group will contain any contacts that we have modified within the last three days.

7. Export to Sort

If the Smart Group’s idea in step 6 doesn’t meet all of your sorting needs, you’ll need to export your data out of Address Book using the shareware app Export Address Book (€12.50, software.dibomedia.de), which will let you export any fields that you specify—including the Creation Date and the Modification Date—as a CSV (comma-separated values) file. You can then open that file in a spreadsheet app, such as Numbers or Excel, and sort your data there.

Export Address Book gives you complete control over exporting your data from Address Book.

8. Claim Your Identity

Safari’s AutoFill feature (in Safari, choose Edit > AutoFill Form) makes it easy to fill out online forms with your personal information. But where does Safari pull this information from? From the Address Book card that you’ve designated as yourself. To do that, simply find yourself in Address Book and then choose Card > Make This My Card.

When you claim a card as your own, the little icon to the left of your name changes to a human silhouette.

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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