7.4. Windows Contacts: All Versions Windows Contacts (Start  All Programs Windows Contacts) is a new feature in Windows Vista: a central directory for phone numbers , email addresses, and mailing addresses. Its not so much a program as a specialized Explorer window, complete with individual icons that represent the people in your social circle. When you open it (Figure 7-8), click New Contact on the toolbar. You're shown a dialog box with tabbed panels for various categories of contact information. Fill in the name , email address, phone number, and other information for this person.  | Figure 7-8. On the "Name and Email" tab of a contact's dialog box, you can replace the creepily featureless generic headshot with an actual digital photo of this person. To do that, click the creepy head or torso; from the shortcut menu, choose "Change picture." Navigate to, and double-click, the digital photo you want to use . | |
After you've gone to the trouble of typing in all of this information, Windows Vista repays your efforts in three places, for starters: -
In Windows Mail . As Chapter 12 makes clear, a well-informed address book is extremely useful when sending an email message. There's no need to remember that Harold Higgenbottom's email address is hhiggenbottom@crawl-space.ix.net.de; instead, you only need to type hhig . The program fills in the email address for you automatically. -
In the Search dialog box . As noted in Chapter 3, you can quickly look up somebody's number using the Start menu's new Search box. -
In the shortcut menu . If you right-click someone's name in your Contacts window, the Action submenu (in the shortcut menu) offers two useful options. One is Send Email, which opens up an outgoing, preaddressed message to this person. The other is Call This Contact. If your PC is hooked up to a phone line (and so is your phone), Windows can dial the number for you. Microsoft's hope is that other software companies will take advantage of Contacts' open design (it's written in XML, a common Web language) so that they, too, can exploit your address book.
Tip: To import address book information from another program, click Import on the toolbar. Windows can inhale the information from any of several popular address-book formats, including CSV, LDFI, vCard, and Windows Address Book (that is, Outlook Express).
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