Update Address Book and iCal - from an email
Previously we looked at where we meet our contacts from Address Book again. Today we will find out, how to create and update our existing contact base - without opening Address Book - or create an appointment right from Apple Mail - without iCal.
If you haven’t used Mail, the built-in eMail application, take a look at this Apple document to get you started on it. All in this tutorial is about, is based on it. Be sure to check out our posts on Address Book and iCal before we go on, if you haven’t yet done so.
Create / Update a contact from an email
The simplest way to add a person to your Address Book or updated it, is to add the name and the email address. In Mail, select an email and hover the mouse cursor over the “From” field.
This will put the sender’s name and email address into a blue bubble. Click the little arrow on the right to bring up a list of possible actions.
This menu contains a bunch of actions. Pick Add to Address Book.
For this action to work, Address Book does not need to be open. It happens all in the background.
After you added the email address to the Address Book, the email address disappears from the “From” field and only the name is displayed, indicating that this person is in your Address Book.
Note that hovering over the name and clicking the arrow will give change the menu item from before, Add to Address Book into Open in Address Book.
If you open Address Book, you will see that the contact has been updated properly. Nice touch: If you have a picture for that contact in Address Book, it will show up in Mail as well.
Data Detectors - for contact information
With Mac OS X Leopard, Apple introduced a cool new feature. Data detectors. They scan your emails in Mail and allow you to automatically update your contacts or create appointments - right from Mail, without having to open Address Book or Mail.
Note: All the scanning is done only on your computer and no information is submitted to Apple.
Usage is really simple. Move your mouse over some data, for example a mail address.
This will frame the data and present you a arrow to open up a drop down menu, allowing you to update an existing contact or create a new one.
As you decide to update or add a contact, data detectors will go through the entire email and search for additional information, such as phone numbers, addresses, and so on.
You will be presented with an overview of the existing data, already in Address Book, and the new one acquired via data detectors (written in green).
Click the labels (work, home, mobile, …) to change the label for the associated data.
Again, you don’t need to have Address Book open for this to work. Everything happens in the background.
Data Detectors - for appointments
Data detectors not only work with personal information. They can also recognize dates and times and let you schedule appointments in iCal - directly from Mail.
It works the same way. Hover the mouse cursor over a date - so the data gets framed. Click the triangle and select Create New iCal Event…
A window will pop up with data from the email already filled in. Adjust it to your needs (ie pick a different calendar, set an ending time, etc.)
Adjust the appointments as you wish and click Add to iCal. Again, as with Address Book, iCal does not need to be open.
So, how do you like data detectors? We think they are great and can save you a lot of copy/paste work and minimize the time you spent getting things organized.
Be sure to check out this post on the built-in synchronization software iSync to get your contacts and appointments onto your mobile.
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Tags: Address Book, data, iCal, iSync, Mail, synchronization
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August 5th, 2008 at 11:33 am
i culd be conti……..this infor..