Ten steps to a smarter Address Book
I feel a bit sorry for Address Book. It sits in the background, chugging away and serving up contact details, but seldom gets the attention it deserves.
It doesn’t have a special day as iCal does (Wikipedia 
). It doesn’t have a blog dedicated to it. Steve Jobs doesn’t wax lyrical about spending his day in it as he does with Mail.app.
To celebrate this quiet achiever, I am having a little Address Book Day of my own today.
First, five tips to help Address Book do its work better:
- Creating iCal appointments from Address Book vCards. A quick drag and drop tip that saves time and typing. And is a clever example of iApp integration to boot.
- Setting a default email address in Address Book. Help Address Book to know which email address is your preferred one for a particular contact (in a Group—as Yoram rightly points out in the comments).
- A fistful of Address Book tips from Scott Kelby’s Mac OS X Tiger Killer Tips.
- Tips on printing Address Book contacts.
- Ed Eubank’s LowEndMac article on Supercharging Address Book offers some tips, uncovers ‘hidden features’ and suggests some great plugins to help you maximise Address Book’s usefulness.
The Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List contains 22 extras, addons and utilities that make Address Book better.
Here are five that I particularly like:
- BuddyPOP: Quick pop-up access to your Address Book Data. (See also the freeware but less-fully featured TapDex).
- JABMenu: A menubar quick-access utility for Address Book.
- Snail Mail: Beautiful envelopes and labels from Address Book.
- MySync: Sync Address Book to many Macs without .Mac.
- Plugins to integrate Address Book and Google Calendar.
Related posts
December 12th, 2006 at 12:47 am
Unfortunately, the first two tips contain dead links :(
December 12th, 2006 at 12:51 am
Not any more. Thanks for pointing that out.
December 12th, 2006 at 1:13 am
Well, it’s not an Address Book plug-in, but Spell Catcher X’s Completion feature set to show “Matching Address Book Cards” makes all the names, e-mails, phone numbers, and postal addresses in your AB available in any program, anywhere you can enter text…
December 12th, 2006 at 1:25 am
Evan, Fancy that!
I’m an avid Spell Checker X user as you know, but had not stumbled upon that option before. Thanks for the tip.
December 12th, 2006 at 1:30 am
Great post but i got a 404 on “Creating iCal appointments from Address Book vCards” and “Setting a default email address in Address Book” Hope to check them out soon
December 12th, 2006 at 3:56 am
The most frustrating thing I have experienced in Address Book (possibly due to an unknown option) is the inability to print a full sheet of return address labels with my own address card.
Currently, I have to copy my own vcard 29 times, then print all my duplicate contacts on one Avery 8660 label sheet (30 labels). Once done, I have to then delete the 29 duplicates.
There HAS to be an easier way to print a full sheet of return address labels in Address Book.
I would be very, very thankful if someone could explain how to do this basic, yet amazingly frustrating task.
December 12th, 2006 at 5:07 am
If you have gone trough that process once, you could have printed it to a pdf which you could use over and over again.
December 12th, 2006 at 5:09 am
Jason: For labels, try Pearl Labelizer:
http://www.pearworks.com
and Plaxo rocks!! If you can get away from the nagging to upgrade..!
Bye
AM
December 12th, 2006 at 5:49 am
This is only remotely related, but I like to create AB entries for each of my Macs. I use one of the phone number entries for Apple’s toll free support line and another for the Mac’s serial Number. The Large Type option makes the SN really easy to read when needed.
December 12th, 2006 at 6:40 am
WIll anyone read this? I have NOT been able to either a) print my address book, or b) print to a PDF file, for a while. It has about 720 entries.
Any idea how to fix this?
David
david@ferleger.com
December 13th, 2006 at 1:08 am
Please, please, please….Plaxo is the #1 Superaddon for Addressbook. By using Plaxo you’ll never ever have to add anyone to Addressbook ever again! How can one state and state about it without commenting on the brilliance of Plaxo?
I sound like an advertisement. Well, maybe because it’s so fucking brilliant.
December 13th, 2006 at 1:21 am
I like using Plaxo (http://www.plaxo.com/) on my Macs and it keeps the address book contacts in sync across the machines as well as providing a web interface that I can use on any computer when I’m away from my own. I’ve tried MySync and I think Plaxo does a better job.
February 1st, 2007 at 5:28 am
its missing the most important thing how to sort addressbook, you would think Apple would have thought of this since they get paid billions a year so much for apple intelligence