Chapter 6: Keeping Track with the Address Book

In This Chapter

Adding contact cards

Editing contacts

Using contact information throughout Mac OS X

Creating and e-mailing groups

Printing contacts

Importing and exporting vCards

Do you have a well-thumbed address book stuck in a drawer of your office desk? Or do you have a wallet or purse stuffed with sticky notes and odd scraps of paper, each of which bears an invaluable e-mail address or phone number? If so, you can finally set yourself free and enjoy the “Paperless Lifestyle” of the new millennium with the revolutionary new Rauncho Digital Address Book! As seen on TV! Only $29.95 — and it doubles as an indestructible garden hose! But wait! If you order now, we’ll also send you . . .

Of course, you and I would tune that stuff out as soon as we heard, “As seenon TV” — but, believe it or not, the Rauncho Digital Address Book does exist (after a fashion), and you already have one on your Mac. It’s called the Address Book, and in this chapter, I show you how to store and retrieve all your contact data, including iChat information, photographs, and much more.

(And before you ask, operators are not standing by.)

Hey, Isn’t the Address Book Just a Part of Mail?

It’s true that in early versions of Mac OS X, Address Book was relegated to the minor leagues and usually appeared only when you asked for it within Mail. Although it could be run as a separate application, there was no convenient route to the Address Book from the Desktop, so most Mac owners never launched it as a standalone.

Now, however, the Address Book appears in the limelight, earning a default location in the Dock and available whenever you need it. Although the Address Book can still walk through a meadow hand-in-hand with Mail, it also flirts with other Mac OS X applications and can even handle some basic telephony chores all by itself through the use of Services.

Figure 6-1 illustrates the default face of the Address Book, complete with a personal address card: your own contact information, which you enter within the First Use Assistant that I mention in Book I, Chapter 1. This card carries a special me tag on your thumbnail image (indicating that it’s your personal card) as well as a suave-looking silhouette next to your name in the Name column. Other Mac OS X applications use the data in your card to automatically fill out your personal information in all sorts of documents. (In Figure 6-1, I added a number of well-known friends as well . . . a few TV characters, a composer or two. You know the drill.)

Note that when you move your mouse cursor over the Group and Name column dividers, the cursor changes to a double arrow. This indicates that when you click and drag the divider, you can resize the Group and Name columns as well as the display pane on the right. Plus, you can click the two buttons at the upper-left corner (underneath the window controls) to hide or show the Group and Name columns.

Figure 6-1: Greetings from the Mac OS X Address Book!

Entering Contact Information

Unless you actually meet and hire a group of DataElves — see the sidebar, “I gotta type (or retype) that stuff?” — you have to add contacts to your Address Book manually. Allow me to demonstrate here how to create a new contact within your Address Book:

1. Launch Address Book from the Dock by clicking its icon.

The icon looks like an old-fashioned paper Address Book with an @ symbol on the cover.

2. Press the Ô+N shortcut to create a new contact. Alternatively, choose File⇒New Card or click the Add a New Person button at the bottom of the Name column.

Address Book displays the template that you see in Figure 6-2, with the First name field highlighted and ready for you to type.

3. Enter the contact’s first name and press Tab to move to the Last name field.

4. Continue entering the corresponding information in each field, pressing Tab to move through the fields.

If a field isn’t applicable (for example, if a person has no home page), just press Tab again to skip it. You can press Return to add extra lines to the Address field.

Figure 6-2: “Hey, I don’t know anyone named First Last!”

When you complete certain fields — such as the Address field — a green plus symbol pops up to the left of the field. That’s the Address Book telling you that there are additional versions of the field that you can enter as well. (Think home and work addresses.) Click this plus sign, and you can enter the other version. For example, if you enter an iChat address for the contact at home, the plus sign appears; click it and then you can enter the contact’s work iChat address, too.

You can also add new fields to a card, such as Web addresses, birthdays, maiden names, and the like. To add a new field, click Card⇒Add Field and choose the field you want to add from the menu that appears.

5. To add a photograph to the card, click Card⇒Choose Custom Image (or drag an image from a Finder window on top of the thumbnail square).

Address Book displays a sheet that you can use to select the image. Click Choose to display our old friend the Open dialog.

If your Mac has an iSight camera, you can click the Capture a picture from a video camera button (which bears a snazzy camera icon).

6. When you’re done, click the Edit button (bottom center) to save the card.

You can edit the contents of a card at any time by displaying it and clicking the Edit button at the bottom (or by pressing Ô+L, or even by clicking Edit and choosing the Edit Card menu item).

No need to edit a card to add information to the Note field — just click and type.

You can also add contact cards directly to your Address Book from the Mac OS X Mail application — go figure. Within Mail, click the message (to highlight it) from the person whom you want to add, click the friendly Message menu, and then click Add Sender to Address Book, or press Ô+Y. Naturally, adding people this way doesn’t add their supporting information — just their name and e-mail address (and, if they used Mail on their end to send the message and they have a photo attached to their personal card, their photo gets imported as well). Once again, your nimble fingers have to manually enter the rest. For more on Mail, see Book V, Chapter 2.

Don’t forget to add those fax numbers! If you have an internal or external analog modem, Snow Leopard can fax from any application — just click File and choose Print (or press Ô+P) as you always have, and then click the PDF button at the bottom of the Print dialog and choose Fax PDF. Mac OS X automatically fills in the address for you, but only if the contact has a fax number entered as part of the contact card.

If someone sends you a vCard (look for an attachment with a .vcf extension), consider yourself lucky. Just drag the vCard from the attachment window in Mail and drop it in your Address Book; any information that the person wants you to have is added automatically!

To delete a card, click the unlucky name to display the card, click Edit, and then choose Delete Card.

Using Contact Information

Okay, after you have your contact information in Address Book, what can you actually do with it? Often, all you really need is a quick glance at an address. To display the card for any contact within Address Book, just click the desired entry in the Name column. You can move to the next and previous cards by using the up- and down-arrow keys on your keyboard. (Oh, and don’t forget that you can right-click many items within a card to display menu commands specific to those items.)

But wait, there’s more! You can also

♦ Copy and paste. The old favorites are still around. You can copy any data from a card (press Ô+C) and paste it into another open application (press Ô+V).

♦ Visit a contact’s home page. Click the contact entry to select it, and click the page link displayed within the card. Safari dutifully answers the call, and next thing you know, you’re online and at the home page specified in the entry.

♦ Send an e-mail message. If you’ve already read through Chapter 3 of this minibook, you’ll remember the Mac OS X services feature that I tell you about. Click and drag to select any e-mail address on a card; then click the Address Book menu, click the Services menu, and choose Send To. Bingo! Depending on the information that you select, other services might also be available.

♦ Add an iChat buddy. From within iChat, click the Buddies menu and then click Add a Buddy. From the dialog that appears, you can select a contact card that has an Instant Messenger address and add it to your Buddy List.

♦ Export contacts. From within the Address Book, select the contacts that you want to export, click File, and then choose Export vCards from the Export pop-up menu. Address Book displays a Save sheet. Navigate to the location where you want to save the cards and click Save.

♦ Search amongst your contacts. If you’re searching for a specific person and all you have is a phone number or a fragment of an address, click in the Search field at the top right of the Address Book window and type the text. While you continue to enter characters, Address Book shows you how many contacts contain matching characters and displays just those entries in the Name column. Now that’s sassy! (And convenient. And fast as all get-out.) Check out Figure 6-3, where many of the characters from my favorite TV shows are gathered — note that a number of very familiar folks share the same address in Gotham City, and I found them by using the Search field.

Speaking of searching using a contact in the Address Book, Spotlight is also at your beck and call — click a contact to select it; then click the Edit menu and choose Spotlight. Whoosh! Snow Leopard searches your entire system for everything related to that contact and displays it in the familiar Spotlight window.

Figure 6-3: Holy Text Match, Batman!

Arranging Your Contact Cards

Address Book also provides you with a method of organizing your cards into groups. A group usually consists of folks with a common link, such as your family, friends, co-workers, and others who enjoy yodeling. For example, you could set up a Cell Phone group that you can use when syncing data with your Bluetooth cell phone.

To create a group, choose File⇒New Group or press Ô+Shift+N. (Using the Hollywood method, click the plus-sign button at the bottom of the Group column.) Address Book creates a new entry in the Group column, with a highlighted text box so that you can type the group name. After you type the group name, press Return to save it, and then click and drag the entries that you want to add to the New Group icon.

If you already selected the entries for those contacts that you want to add to the group, choose File⇒New Group from Selection instead. This saves you a step because the group is created and the members are added automatically.

After you create a New Group, you can instantly display members of that group by clicking its icon in the Group column. To return to the display of all your contacts, click the All Group button.

To further organize your groups, you can drag and drop a group on top of another group. It becomes a subgroup, which is handy for things like branch offices within your company or perhaps relatives to whom you’re not speaking at the moment.

Need an even harder-working group? Create a Smart Group, which — get this — automatically adds new contacts you create to the proper group, depending on the criteria you specify! To create a Smart Group, follow these steps:

1. Click File and click New Smart Group.

2. Type a name for the new Smart Group.

3. Click the Card pop-up menu and choose the item that will trigger the action.

For example, you can choose to automate a Smart Group according to the contents of each new card, a company name, or a particular city or state.

4. Click the Contains pop-up menu and choose the criteria for the item.

An item might contain (or not contain) a specific string of characters, or it might have changed in a certain amount of time. To illustrate, one of my hardest-working Smart Groups automatically checks the Company field in every new card for my publisher’s company name and adds that contact card to my Wiley Publishing group if a match occurs.

5. To add another criteria line, click the button with the plus sign at the end of the first text field.

If you decide you have one criteria line too many, click the button with the minus sign next to the offending rule.

6. After your Smart Group criteria are correct, click OK.

The Smart Group name appears in your group list. Voilà!

Here’s another handy feature of an Address Book group: You can send all the members of a group the same e-mail message at one time. Within Mail, simply enter the Group name in the To field in the Compose window, and the same message is sent to everyone. Even Gandalf couldn’t do that (but my copy editor bets that Dumbledore could).

Using Network Directories

I know, I know, I said earlier that you’d have to enter all your contacts yourself — but I was talking about your personal contacts! You can also access three types of external directories from within Address Book:

♦ Mac users working in a Windows network environment can use Exchange 2007 network directories.

♦ If you’re a member of a company NetInfo network — and if you don’t know, ask your wizened network administrator — you can search network directory servers from within Address Book. These servers are available automatically, so no configuration is necessary. Sweet.

♦ You can search Internet-based LDAP directories. Sorry, folks, I know that’s pretty cryptic, but others have written entire books on this technology. Again, suffice it to say that your network guru can tell you whether LDAP servers are available to you. (In another blazing display of techno-nerd acronym addiction, LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.) With LDAP, you can search a central company directory from anywhere in the world as long as you have an Internet connection. To configure this feature, click Address Book from the menu and choose Preferences; click the LDAP tab and then click the + (plus sign) button to enter the specific settings for the server that you want to access. Your network administrator or the LDAP server administrator can supply you with these settings.

To search any network directory, you need to create a corresponding directory account. Follow these steps to add a directory account:

1. Click Address Book⇒Preferences to display the Preferences window.

2. Click the Add button to launch the Add Account assistant.

3. Click the Account Type pop-up menu to choose the desired species of network directory.

Type the required information in the fields that appear. (Your network administrator should be able to provide you with the necessary values.)

4. Click Create.

You’ll see the blue network directory entry appear in the Group column.

The rest is easy! Click the Directories entry in the Group column and use the Search field as you normally would. Matching entries display the person’s name, e-mail address, and phone number.

“But hey, Mark, what if I’m not online? My company’s LDAP directory isn’t much good then, right?” Normally, that’s true. If you’re a mobile user, LDAP information is available to you only when you’re online and the LDAP server is available. Ah, but here’s a rocking power user tip that’ll do the trick for MacBook owners: To make a person’s information always available, search the LDAP database and drag the resulting entry from the Directories window to the All group. You’ll import the information to your local Address Book — and you’ll see it even when you’re not online!

Printing Contacts with Flair

Consider how to print your contacts (for those moments when you need an archaic hard copy). Address Book offers two different formats.

By default, Address Book prints on standard U.S. letter-size paper (8½ x 11 inches) in portrait orientation. You can change these settings right from the Print dialog: Choose File and click Print or press Ô+P. From the Print dialog, you can choose exotic settings, such as legal-size paper or landscape orientation.

Follow these steps to print your contacts:

1. Press Ô+P.

Address Book displays the Print dialog. To show all the settings, click the Expand button next to the Printer field, which carries a downward-pointing triangle.

If you need more than one copy, click in the Copies field to specify the desired number.

Need labels? We’ve got ’em! Click the Style pop-up menu and choose Mailing Labels to specify what type of label stock you’re using on the Layout panel. Click the Label button to sort your labels by name or postal code, choose a font, select a text color, and add an icon or image to your labels. To switch back to a standard contact list, click Style again and then click Lists. (You can also print envelopes and pocket address book pages in a similar manner — just choose the desired entry from the Style pop-up menu.)

2. Select the desired Attributes check boxes to specify which contact card fields you want to appear in your list.

The Attributes list appears only if you’re printing contacts in Lists style.

3. Click the Print button to send the job to the selected printer.

Alternatively, you can create a PDF file in a specified location — a handy trick to use if you’d rather not be burdened with paper, but you still need to consult the list or give it to others. (PDF files are a special document display format developed by Adobe; they display like a printed document but take up minimal space.) To display the contents of a PDF file in Mac OS X, you need only double-click it in the Finder window, and the built-in Preview application is happy to oblige.

Swapping Bytes with vCards

A vCard is a standard file format for exchanging contacts between programs such as Address Book, Microsoft Entourage, Eudora, and the Palm computer desktop. (Heck, if you’re lucky enough to have an iPod, you can even store vCard data there.) Think of a vCard as an electronic business card that you can attach to an e-mail message, send via File Transfer Protocol (FTP), or exchange with others by using your cellular phone and palmtop computer. vCard files end with the extension .vcf.

In Address Book, you can create a single vCard containing one or more selected entries by choosing File⇒Export and choosing Export vCard. Then, as with any other Mac OS X Save dialog, just navigate to the spot where you want the file saved, give it a name, and click Save.

To import vCards into Address Book

♦ Drag the vCard files that you’ve received to Address Book and drop them in the application window.

♦ Alternatively, choose File⇒Import (or press Ô+O). From the Open dialog, navigate to the location of the vCard files that you want to add, select them, and then click Open.