Get the Most out of Apple Address Book

Although it at first appears to be a very simple application, Apple’s Address Book actually has a lot of tricks up its sleeve, and some excellent plugins are available to guide its way to become an incredible tool for remembering birthdays, getting directions, and organizing all your contacts.

The Basics
Under the General pane of the Address Book’s preferences, you can set it to display and sort your contacts either by first name or by last name, how to format addresses, how big you want fonts to be, whether to synchronize with .Mac or Exchange, and whether to notify others when your personal card changes.

Next, under the Template pane, you can select exactly how you want new contacts to appear. There are some interesting fields you can add such as “assistant” and “anniversary.”

Under the Phone pane, you set how to format phone numbers. If you tell it to use the format “+1 (123) 456-7890″, it will automatically format any 11 digit phone number into this view.

Under the vCard pane, you select the preferences for exporting vCards, which we’ll talk about a little later.

I’m not exactly sure what LDAP does, but here is Wikipedia’s take on it.

Finally, the Sharing pane allows you to share your address book with others, but only if you both use .Mac.

Plugins
There are a bunch of great plugins for Address Book, and many applications even include them built in. Most of these plugins are accessed by pressing the field name located to the left of the contact’s information. For example, Adium installs a plugin for messaging contacts. When you press the “home” or “work” field beside a contact’s screenname, a pop down menu will show you give you the options “Adium,” and “Perform search with Spotlight.” Additionally, if it is an iChat compatible service such as AIM, it will give you an “iChat” option. Other applications that have included plugins to Address Book are Skype and Gizmo Project, which work with phone numbers of course.

There are some more standalone plugins that greatly increase Address Book’s power. The first of them is Brian Toth’s free Google Maps Plugin. When you select an address, this plugin adds the options to find a map of the location, copy the URL of the map, get Google Maps or Earth directions from or to another contact, or to locate the contact in Google Earth.

A second useful Address Book plugin is Brian Toth’s $10 PostCheck. It will automatically complete addresses with ZIP codes, cities, and states, and conform you address fields to the USPS standard. The free trial only permits 5 uses, but if you manage a lot of addresses this is a very useful plugin to buy.

Another great plugin is Arstiness‘ “Address Book Dates“. This one adds more options to the birthday and anniversary fields. Features added to the birthday field include age, next birthday, astrological sign, Chinese zodiac sign, and iCal links to the contact’s birth date and upcoming birthdays. This plugin adds how long since someone has been married to the anniversary field, as well as how much longer there is until the next anniversary, and links to upcoming anniversaries in iCal. This plugin also is customizable through its preference window, so you can remove any of the options you do not like, and format them.

Printing and Exporting
Address Book is also a great tool for printing out envelopes, labels, pocket address books, and lists. All of these are highly customizable and accessed through the print menu (File>Print).

As mentioned earlier, contacts and groups can be exported into vCards for sharing with others, and these even are compatible with Windows users.

Groups and Smart Groups
Address Book allows you to organize contacts manually into groups by dragging and dropping, or into Smart Groups. Smart Groups work like iTunes Smart Playlists–they constantly add any contact that matches given criteria. For example, you could set a Smart Group to find all your coworkers, by setting “Company is _______”.

Groups are useful for organizing your contacts digitally and for when you want to print them out, and can even be used as email lists. You can Control-click on a group and select “Send email to Group” and a new message will pop up in Apple Mail, or you can manually add the group from within Mail.

What Else Can it Do?
Other features in this awesome application include its integration with iSync, allowing you to transfer contacts to your iPod or cell phone with or without Bluetooth, its ability to merge and search for duplicate contacts, sending contacts, setting companies, sending your own contact updates, and custom images.

In Conclusion…
Apple Address Book really is an incredibly capable contact manager, and with the various great plugins for it can become one of the most productive tools in any Mac user’s arsenal.