Mac Kindergarten

Some time ago, we had a post on Address Book, a handy application, that comes with Mac OS X.

While it’s nice to have your contacts stored in one place and be able to sync them to your mobile (look at this post for more information) there is more to Address Book. Let’s see which applications make use of Address Book and where you’ll meet your contacts again.

For this tutorial we are using Address Book which already contains some sample data. Be sure to check out the post mentioned above to get there yourself.

In Address Book
To see what we can do with data, already entered, let’s start in Address Book itself.

As you move over a field’s name it gets highlighted, indicating there are actions with this particular data available.

Click the field name (e.g. home) to pop up a menu showing you the available actions.

The actions you can perform, vary from field to field. You can send an email, display the phone number at a very large type, bring up a Google Map of the address, put the entire address on the clipboard (for a mailing label) and much more.

If you have Skype installed, you can even start a call or send SMS messages to a phone number. Just go and explore by yourself.

In Apple Mail

If you haven’t used the Mail application that comes with your Mac, give it a try. There is a good tutorial over at Apple to get you started.

So, as you compose a new email, start typing away the name of the recipient you want to mail to, Mail will look up possible recipients from your Address Book.

Nickname field
If you have added a nickname for a contact in Address Book (via Card > Add Field), you can even use the person’s nickname in the “To” field of Mail. Address Book will provide the correct data.

You can use the Nickname field to add additional information to a contact. This is especially useful for people you a not in regular contact with. As you send the email, they will not see the nick name you assigned to them (or any other data from your Address Book).

Send emails to groups
You can also send emails to groups, created in Address Book. Say you have a group in Address Book, called “Best friends”. In Mail, simply start to type Best friends.

Press the enter/return key and their names will show up.

To choose a specific address for a contact with multiple email addresses, move your mouse to the right of a name and a small triangle will appear.

Clicking it will allow you to choose a different email address and provide some more actions.

In Skype

The popular instant messaging and phone application Skype, integrates all contacts from Address Book into its contact list, so you can also call/send SMS messages from Skype, using the data you already entered in Address Book. The contacts from Address Book are typically listed after your regular Skype contacts.

You might need to activate it in Skype. To do so, go to Skype > Preferences > General and check Show Address Book Contacts.

In regular Mail

Of course, you can use Address Book not only to send electronic mail, but also regular mail. Address Book has a built-in address function to print address labels.

From the File menu, select Print or press the shortcut command-P (works in almost any application).

Expand the print dialog, by clicking the rectangle next to the printer name.

Check out the different modes of printing, listed next to Style.

Below that you’ll find advanced options for each printing style. Holiday greetings here I come!

Address Book and Adium

If you happen to be a user of the great Instant Messaging software Adium (post on it here) you might want to take a look at AdiumBook. It’s a great utility allowing you to keep your Address Book and Adium buddy list in sync.

In Safari

We already had a post on how to use the “Me” card of Address Book to automatically fill in personal information on websites. Click here for that post.

What’s also quite useful, is to have all people with a web site (URL entered in Address Book) in your Safari Bookmark bar. Here is how to enable it:

1) Open Safari’s preferences
2) Go to the Bookmarks tab
3) Check Include Address Book

After that you’ll have a new entry in your Bookmarks Bar, labeled Address Book.

Many more …

There are many more applications out there, that make use of Address Book. To a lot of switchers, Address Book seems like a standalone application, which only seems to store your contacts data.

But as you see, it integrates very well with other components in Mac OS X. Thus reducing the time you need to copy/paste contacts data from one place to another and keep up with data consistency.

Less time for contact maintenance on your computer, more time for contact maintenance in real life!

 Email This Post

Tags: Address Book, Adium, data, IM, Mail, productivity, Safari, Skype

Related posts:

Launch multiple applications or web sites at once

Update Address Book and iCal - from an email

Make Butler write text for you

Fill out web forms in Safari automatically

No more file chaos with color labels

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 11:04 am and is filed under workflows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.