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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you need to quickly copy someone’s entire address—for pasting into an email, for example—make sure that you’re not in Edit mode. Then click the label of the address field (e.g., “work”) and choose Copy Mailing Label.
Choose Copy Mailing Label to save this address to your Clipboard.
While you’re in the same contextual menu (from clicking the address-field label as described in step 9), you can choose Map Of to go to a Google Map of that location in your default browser. Or choose Copy URL Of Map if you want to paste that map’s URL into an email or chat.
Clicking our work address and selecting Map Of gave us this map to Mac|Life HQ.
If you’re going blind (like we are) and can’t see those small phone numbers when you’re trying to call someone, first make sure that you’re not in Edit mode, and then click the label of the phone (e.g. “mobile”) and choose Large Type. This will fill your entire screen with the selected phone number—super useful when you’re walking to the fax machine all the way across the room.
Can you see me now?
