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TUAW Tip: Address Book offers a lot of handy contact management

by David Chartier Jun 7th 2007 at 5:30PM

Address Book is one of Apple's apps that might seem too basic at first glance to many a user. While this under-appreciation could largely be due to its unassuming name, Address Book offers a surprising amount of useful features, especially in the contact management department. Of course, there are the typical Apple-esque Smart Groups which you can use to automatically and dynamically round up contacts based on any criteria you want (family last names, employers or even notes you add yourself), but check out the Card menu in Address Book and note two options: Merge Selected Cards and (my personal favorite since I play with way too much synching software in the name of TUAW and Download Squad) Look for Duplicate Entries. Those are two great tools for ensuring your contacts only take up one entry each in Address Book (if you only want one entry for each, that is), and I highly recommend using Look for Duplicate Entries if things get out of hand, as it's saved me countless hours after botched synching sessions and wayward synching software had their way with my contacts.


Importing new contacts cards (usually .VCF files) is nothing very special, but Address Book is pretty smart when you import a card for someone already in you contacts list. Typically, Address Book will catch the potential duplication and offer you four options for managing both the old and new cards. A window will be presented with four buttons along the bottom: Keep Old, Keep New, Keep Both and Update, allowing you to ensure that you don't blow away old data you want to keep for the contact while importing anything new you might need.

Combine some of these tricks and tools with the Mail + Address Book tips Merlin Mann wrote about back in April, and you have some pretty powerful tools for managing your contacts and organizing the correspondence you have with them.

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Address Book is one of Apple's apps that might seem too basic at first glance to many a user. While this under-appreciation could largely...
 

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Polo

wow...thanx for this tip. that's exactly why i keep reading your blog. these are things i would have never found out on my own.

June 08 2007 at 10:32 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
David Chartier

#2: Sadly, no - it simply tells you how many duplicate cards and entries it found, and gives you one last 'Cancel/Ok' dialog before actually doing it. I would recommend using File > Backup Address Book before performing this operation if you're worried, as just below that option is File > Restore Address Book to make things right again if something goes wrong.

June 08 2007 at 12:44 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Nigel Hall

There's an interesting application called CRM4Mac that pulls together all of the information stored in Address Book, Mail, and iCal. It basically uses the existing applications and their data stores to create a prety good contact management application. It's a neat idea and I wish Apple would come up with their own take on it. Seems like it would be so simple to do, and so incredibly useful. I run a small business and have hundreds of contacts that I need to track, schedule calls with, take notes on, and log to-dos for. The Mac has all of the applications that can do this but they're not integrated.

June 08 2007 at 12:42 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Thomas Han

In addition to Address Book.app, you can use many tools to sync up to online address books. I use the Plaxo plugin that will auto sync so I have access to my Address Book anywhere.

The Plaxo plugin actually syncs up the "Notes" that you put in your entries, which may not be true for other sync plugins.

June 08 2007 at 12:18 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Eric Blair

Thanks for the note - I'd forgotten about dupe detection. That feature should make the updating the 70+ contacts I have sitting in an Excel spreadsheet less painful.

June 07 2007 at 9:03 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
ToupsWinker

I use it, but sadly I don't have a lot of addresses. Should I buy Iwork or wait and see if Leopard incorporates it?

June 07 2007 at 7:52 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Churry

I've always been afraid to use Look for Duplicate Entries because I don't know if I can examine the entries before merging. Does it indeed offer the same four options (keep old, keep new, etc.) that the import function offers?

June 07 2007 at 7:44 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
uros

This is... actually helpful. I think Address Book.app is thanking you for showing off some of its features.

June 07 2007 at 7:13 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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