Manage Contacts with Address Book

Apple’s Address Book is your central repository for contacts under Mac OS X. Many Mac applications use this program: it contains names and e-mail addresses for use with Mail, holds information on your buddies for use with iChat, and even works with iCal when you want to add attendees to events or send invitations. You can store all kinds of information for your contacts, from their phone numbers and e-mail addresses to their home page URLs and their .Mac public folder addresses. You can even add pictures to your contact cards.

To open Address Book, click its icon in the Dock or double-click its icon in the Applications folder.

Address Book has a simple interface (Figure 15-3), and is fast and efficient. You can enter individual contacts and create groups or drag vCards (virtual address cards) sent with e-mail messages or saved by other programs. Better yet, Address Book acts as your little black book of e-mail addresses when working with Mail. All the addresses you add from messages you receive in Mail are entered in Address Book.

Figure 15-3: Address Book organizes your contacts.

To create a new contact, click the + button at the bottom of the Name column. Enter as little or as much information as you want: you can enter a name, address, telephone, fax, cell phone number, e-mail address, instant messaging name, and more.

Tip

Your contacts can have multiple items in some fields. If you see a green + icon, click this to add a second phone number field, e-mail address, and other items.

Some of the fields you can use don’t display by default; you can add them by selecting Card | Add Field, and selecting one of about a dozen fields in its submenu.

When you’ve finished entering information for your contact, click the Edit button; you can see that it’s depressed in the preceding illustration. When you click it again, you turn off editing mode.

Tip

To change any of your contact’s information, just enter editing mode by clicking the Edit button and change whatever you want.

To create a new group, click the + button at the bottom of the Group column. Type a name for the group, and you can then drag contacts from the Name column onto each group you create.

You can search for contacts by entering a few letters of their name in the Search field at the top of the window. Just start typing, and Address Book whittles down your contacts to those containing the letters you type immediately. You probably won’t even need to type a full name to find the person you’re looking for, unless you have lots of contacts.

Tip

You can change any of the labels in a contact card. Just click the label name (in bold type) and select a different label from the choices available, or select Custom and type your own custom label name.

Work with vCards

vCards, or virtual address cards, are a special kind of file used to exchange data about contacts. Address Book can create and work with vCards, making adding and exchanging contact information quick and easy.

The simplest way to save one of your contacts as a vCard is to just drag it to the Desktop or to another Finder window.

As you drag your contact, your pointer picks up a vCard icon, and when you place it on the Desktop or in a Finder window, it shows as a file with the contact’s name.

You can save your own contact information as a vCard and send it to someone, say by e-mail, as an attachment. To import a vCard sent by someone else, just double-click the vCard file. Address Book displays a dialog informing you that it’s adding a new card. Click OK to accept or Cancel if you don’t want to import it. If you’ve already got information for the same person, Address Book tells you there’s a duplicate of this contact, and offers to let you review the duplicate:

You can choose to keep the old card, the new card, update the existing card, or keep both. This is a good way to update contact information—just have your contact send you their vCard when they change their address, phone number, or e-mail address, and click Update in this dialog; any different information is updated by that in the newer card.