Section 70. Apply Categories to Contacts

70. Apply Categories to Contacts

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

68 Create and Manage Contacts

SEE ALSO

71 Tweak Address Book Options

Categories are used throughout the BlackBerry personal information management system to help you organize address book contacts, tasks , and memos. Within the Address Book application, you use categories to identify and distinguish between contacts. For example, you might want to separate personal and business contacts by categorizing them differently. You can then use categories to filter the main contact list according to a certain category. The Address Book application provides the ability to create new categories, delete existing categories, and assign categories to contacts.

1.	Launch the Address Book Application Scroll to the Address Book icon and click the trackwheel. The Address Book application is launched and displayed on the screen.
2.	Open the Select Category Screen Click the trackwheel and scroll to select Filter from the menu that appears. Click once more to open the Select Category screen, which displays a list of categories from which you can select.
3.	Create and Delete Categories To create a new category, click the trackwheel, select New from the menu that appears, and click again. A dialog box appears that prompts you for the name of the category. Enter the name and click the trackwheel to create the new category. NOTE Although category names can be mixed case, they aren't distinguishable by case. In other words, you can't have two categories named Personal and PERSONAL ; they are considered duplicate categories. To delete a category, scroll the trackwheel to select the category, click, select Delete from the menu that appears, and click again. You are prompted to confirm the category deletionclick Delete to follow through with the deletion or click Cancel to cancel the deletion. 70. Apply Categories to Contacts NOTES If you delete a category that is already assigned to a contact, the category is removed from the contact but the contact itself is not deleted. Categories don't just apply to contacts. They are shared among address book contacts, tasks, and memos. When you add or delete a category from the Address Book application, you are changing the categories for contacts, tasks, and memos as well. When you finish creating and deleting categories, use the Select Category screen to filter contacts so that only contacts assigned to a particular category are shown in the contact list; see 68 Create and Manage Contacts if you need a refresher on how to assign categories to contacts.
4.	Select the Categories for Filtering By default, the contact list that appears in the Address Book application shows all the contacts you've created, regardless of how they are categorized. A useful technique for isolating contacts in a smaller view is to filter the contact list based on categories. For example, if you select a category for filtering, only the contacts set to that category are displayed in the contact list. If you carefully categorize your contacts, this filtering technique provides a quick way to pare down the contact list to those of particular interest to you at the time. To filter the contact list from the Select Category screen, just scroll to select a category and double-click the trackwheel. You immediately return to the contact list, which now has a heading above the contacts that shows on which category the contacts are being filtered. In this example, I'm filtering contacts based on the new Family category, which I've already assigned to a couple of contacts. The result is that only family contacts are displayed in the contacts list.
5.	View All the Contacts Again To restore the full list of contacts, click the trackwheel, select Filter from the menu that appears, and click again. In the Select Category screen, double-click the selected category to deselect it; the main contact list appears with all the contacts again in view.