Chapter 7: Keeping Track with Contacts

In This Chapter

Adding contact cards

Editing contacts

Using contact information throughout OS X

Creating and e-mailing groups

Printing contacts

Importing and exporting vCards

Are you still struggling with a well-thumbed address book stuck in a drawer of your office desk? Are you fighting a wallet or purse crammed with sticky notes and odd scraps of paper, each of which bears an invaluable e-mail address or phone number? If so, you can finally set yourself free and enjoy the “Paperless Lifestyle” of the new millennium with the revolutionary new Rauncho Digital Address Book! Only $29.95 — and it doubles as an indestructible garden hose! But wait! There’s more! And if you order in the nest 10 minutes, we’ll also send you. . . .

Of course, you and I would tune that stuff out as soon as we heard it, but believe it or not, the Rauncho Digital Address Book does exist (after a fashion), and you already have one on your Mac — Contacts. In this chapter, I show you how to store and retrieve all your contact data, including Internet contact information, photographs, and much more.

(And before you ask, operators are not standing by.)

Hey, Isn’t Contacts Just a Part of Mail?

In early versions of OS X, Contacts (then called Address Book) was relegated to the minor leagues and usually appeared only when you asked for it within Mail. Although it could be run as a separate application, many Mac owners never launched it as a standalone.

Now, however, the Contacts application appears in the limelight, earning a default location on the Dock and available whenever you need it. Although Contacts can still walk through a meadow hand-in-hand with Mail, it also flirts with other OS X applications and can even handle some basic telephony chores all by itself through the use of Services.

Figure 7-1 illustrates the default face of the Contacts application, complete with a personal address card: your own contact information, which you enter within the Setup Assistant that I mention in Book I, Chapter 1. This card carries a special me tag on your thumbnail image (indicating that it’s your personal card) as well as a suave-looking silhouette next to your name. Other OS X applications use the data in your card to automatically fill out your personal information in all sorts of documents. (In Figure 7-1, I added a number of well-known friends as well . . . a few TV characters, a composer or two. You know the drill.)

In OS X Mountain Lion, Contacts includes a number of appearance changes from the previous Address Book application in OS X. You’ll notice there are now three icons at the lower center of the Contacts window: These three buttons set the application’s view mode. By default, Contacts uses a two-pane List and Card view that’s similar to a printed book; that’s the middle button of the three. You can display any groups you’ve created by clicking the first button to switch to Groups view. Click the third button (the one bearing the simple square icon) to switch to the single-pane display Card Only view, which takes up less room but sometimes requires an extra mouse click or two while you’re using Contacts.

You can choose the view mode from the View menu as well: Choose View⇒Groups/List and Card/Card Only. From the keyboard, press +1 to display your groups, +2 for List and Card, or +3 for Card Only.

Entering Contact Information

Unless you actually meet and hire a group of DataElves — see the sidebar, “I gotta type (or retype) that stuff?” — you do have to add contacts to Contacts manually. Allow me to demonstrate here how to create a new contact card:

1. Launch Contacts from the Dock by clicking its icon.

The icon looks like an old-fashioned paper address book with an @ symbol on the cover.

2. Press the +N shortcut to create a new contact. Alternatively, choose File⇒New Card or click the Add a New Card button at the bottom of the Name column (which carries a plus sign).

Contacts displays the template that you see in Figure 7-2, with the First Name field highlighted and ready for you to type.

3. Enter the contact’s first name and press Tab to move to the Last name field.

4. Continue entering the corresponding information in each field, pressing Tab to move through the fields.

If a field isn’t applicable (for example, if a person has no home page), just press Tab again to skip it. You can press Return to add extra lines to the Address field.

Notice those icons next to each field — the ones that look like up and down arrows? That’s Contacts telling you that there are additional versions of the field that you can enter as well. (Think home and work addresses.) Click the up/down icon and a pop-up menu appears, allowing you to choose which version of the field will be displayed. Depending on the field, Contacts may automatically display an additional version; for example, if you enter a work address for the contact, another field for the contact’s home address appears. Click this new field and then you can enter the contact’s home address, too.

You can also add new fields to a card, such as web addresses (also called URLs), birthdays, maiden names, and the like. To add a new field, choose Card⇒Add Field and choose the field you want to add from the menu that appears.

5. To add a photograph to the card, choose Card⇒Choose Custom Image (or drag an image from a Finder window on top of the thumbnail square).

If you choose to assign a custom image, click Defaults to select an image from the Mountain Lion thumbnail set (which is the same set you get when assigning a user account image). Click Recents to choose from image thumbnails that you’ve used recently.

If your Mac has an iSight or a FaceTime HD camera, you can click the Camera tab to take a new image. You can also even choose to add a Photo Booth effect to your new image!

6. When you’re done, click the Done button at the bottom of the Contacts window to save the card.

You can edit the contents of a card at any time by displaying it and clicking the Edit button at the bottom (or by pressing +L, or even by clicking Edit on the Contacts menu bar and choosing the Edit Card menu item). When you’re finished editing the card, click Done at the bottom of the Contacts window.

No need to edit a card to add information to the Note field. Just click and type.

You can also add contact cards directly to Contacts from the OS X Mail application, as well as a number of third-party e-mail applications — go figure. Within Mail, click the message (to highlight it) from the person whom you want to add, click the friendly Message menu, and then click Add Sender to Contacts or press +Shift+Y. Naturally, adding people this way doesn’t add their supporting information — just their name and e-mail address (and, if they used Mail on their end to send the message and they have a photo attached to their personal card, their photo gets imported as well). Once again, your nimble fingers have to manually enter the rest. For more on Mail, see Book V, Chapter 2.

“Mark, I never use the Home Page field when I add a contact. Can’t I get rid of it completely?” Indeed you can, good reader! To customize the default fields that appear when you create a new contact card, open the Contacts menu, choose Preferences, and then click the Template tab. Each field has a Delete icon (the red minus sign) and some have an Add icon (the green plus sign). To remove a field from your template, click the Delete icon. To add a new version of a field (for example, a home e-mail address), click the Add icon next to the existing field of the same type, and then click the up/down arrow icon to select the field name. To add a completely new field (like Middle or Maiden Name), click the Add Field drop-down menu.

Don’t forget to add those fax numbers! If you have an external USB analog modem that’s compatible with OS X Mountain Lion, you can fax from any application. Just choose File⇒Print (or press +P) as you always have, and then click the PDF button at the bottom of the Print dialog and choose Fax PDF. OS X automatically fills in the address for you but only if the contact has a fax number entered as part of the contact card.

If someone sends you an e-mail message with a vCard (look for an attachment with a .vcf extension), consider yourself lucky. Just drag the vCard from the attachment window in Mail and drop it in your Contacts; any information that the person wants you to have is added automatically. Sweet!

To delete a card, click the unlucky name to display the card, click Edit, and then choose Delete Card.

Using Contact Information

Okay, after you have your contact information in Contacts, what can you actually do with it? Often, all you really need is a quick glance at an address. To display the card for any contact within Contacts, just click the desired entry in the Name column. To do this, though, you have to be using either Groups or List and Card view mode. You can move to the next and previous cards by using the up- and down-arrow keys on your keyboard. (Oh, and don’t forget that you can right-click many items within a card to display menu commands specific to those items.)

But wait, there’s more! You can also

Copy and paste. The old favorites are still around. You can copy any data from a card (press +C) and paste it into another open application (press +V).

Visit a contact’s home page. Click the contact entry to select it, and then click the page link displayed within the card. Safari dutifully answers the call, and next thing you know, you’re online and at the home page specified in the entry.

Send an e-mail message. If you’ve already read through Chapter 3 of this minibook, you’ll remember the OS X Services feature that I tell you about. Click and drag to select any e-mail address on a card; then choose Contacts⇒Services⇒New Email to Address. Bingo! Depending on the information that you select, other services might also be available.

Add a Messages buddy. From within Messages, choose Buddies⇒Add Buddy. From the dialog that appears, you can select a contact card that has an Instant Messenger address and add it to your Buddy List.

Export contacts. From within Contacts, select the contacts that you want to export and then choose File⇒Export⇒Export vCard. Contacts displays a Save sheet. Navigate to the location where you want to save the cards and click Save.

Send a contact through Mail or Messages. Click the Share a Contact button at the bottom of the Contacts window (it looks like a box with an arrow), and choose either Email Card or Message Card. The Contacts application automatically creates a new Mail message (or Messages conversation) with the contact information attached as a vCard.

Search amongst your contacts. If you’re searching for a specific person and all you have is a phone number or a fragment of an address, click in the Search field (which bears a magnifying glass icon) and type the text. While you continue to enter characters, Contacts shows you how many contact cards contain matching characters and displays just those entries in the Name column. Now that’s sassy! (And convenient. And fast as all get-out.) Check out Figure 7-3; a couple of very familiar folks share the same address in Gotham City, and I found them by using the Search field.

Speaking of searching using a contact card within Contacts, Spotlight is also at your beck and call. Click a contact to select it and then choose Edit⇒Spotlight. Whoosh! Mountain Lion searches your entire system for everything related to that contact and displays it in the familiar Spotlight window.

Arranging Your Contact Cards

Contacts also provides you with a method of organizing your cards into groups. A group usually comprises folks with a common link, such as your family, friends, co-workers, and others who enjoy yodeling. For example, you could set up a Cell Phone group that you can use when syncing data with your Bluetooth cellphone. As I mention earlier, you can switch to the Groups view mode within Contacts by clicking the first view mode button at the bottom of the Contacts window. If you see a strip with the group list appear at the left of the Contacts window, you’ve switched to Groups view.

To create a group, choose File⇒New Group or press +Shift+N. Contacts adds a highlighted text box so that you can type the group name. After you type the group name, press Return to save it.

If you already selected the entries for those contacts that you want to add to the group, choose File⇒New Group from Selection instead. This saves you a step because the group is created, and the members are added automatically.

If you’ve created an empty group, it’s easy to add folks manually. From the group list, click the All Contacts link to see a list of everyone in Contacts database, and then click and drag the entries that you want to add to the desired group name.

After you create a New Group, you can instantly display members of that group by clicking its name in the group list. To return to the display of all your contacts, click the All Contacts link, or click List and Card button to switch back to List and Card view mode.

To further organize your groups, you can drag and drop a group on top of another group. It becomes a subgroup, which is handy for things like branch offices within your company or perhaps relatives to whom you’re not speaking at the moment.

Need an even harder-working group? Create a smart group, which — get this — automatically adds new contacts you create to the proper group or removes them from the group, depending on the criteria you specify! To create a smart group, follow these steps:

1. Choose File⇒New Smart Group.

2. Type a name for the new smart group.

3. From the Card pop-up menu, choose the item that will trigger the action.

For example, you can choose to automate a smart group according to the contents of each new card, a company name, or a particular city or state.

4. From the Contains pop-up menu, choose the criteria for the item.

An item might contain (or not contain) a specific string of characters, or it might have changed in a certain amount of time. To illustrate, one of my hardest-working smart groups automatically checks the Company field in every new card for my publisher’s company name and adds that contact card to my Wiley Publishing group if a match occurs.

5. To add another criteria line, click the button with the plus sign at the end of the first text field.

If you decide you have one criteria line too many, click the button with the minus sign next to the offending rule.

6. After your smart group criteria are correct, click OK.

The Smart Group name appears in your group list. Voilà!

Here’s another handy feature of a Contacts group: You can send all the members of a group the same e-mail message at one time. Within Mail, simply enter the Group name in the To field in the Compose window, and the same message is sent to everyone. Even Gandalf couldn’t do that (but my copy editor bets that Dumbledore could).

Using Network Directories

I know, I know. I said earlier that you’d have to enter all your contacts yourself, but I was talking about your personal contacts. You can also access five types of external directories from within Contacts:

Mac users working in a Windows network environment can use Exchange 2007 (or later) network directories.

If you’re a member of a company NetInfo network — and if you don’t know, ask your wizened network administrator — you can search network directory servers from within Contacts. These servers are available automatically, so no configuration is necessary. Sweet.

OS X Mountain Lion Server offers a Contacts server feature for sharing directories across your network, using the CardDAV standard.

Contacts can share contact information using your Yahoo! account.

You can search Internet-based LDAP directories. Sorry, folks, I know that’s pretty cryptic, but others have written entire books on this technology. Again, suffice it to say that your network guru can tell you whether LDAP servers are available to you. (In another blazing display of techno-nerd acronym addiction, LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol.) With LDAP, you can search a central company directory from anywhere in the world as long as you have an Internet connection. To configure this feature, choose Contacts⇒Preferences; click the Accounts tab and then click the + (plus sign) button at the bottom of the Accounts list to enter the specific settings for the server that you want to access. Your network administrator or the LDAP server administrator can supply you with these settings.

To search any network directory, you need to create a corresponding directory account. Follow these steps to add a directory account:

1. Choose Contacts⇒Preferences to display the Preferences window.

2. Click the Accounts tab.

3. Click the Add button at the bottom of the Accounts list to launch the Add Account assistant.

4. From the Account Type pop-up menu, choose the desired species of network directory.

Type the required information in the fields that appear. (Your network administrator should be able to provide you with the necessary values.)

5. Click Create.

You’ll see the blue network directory entry appear in the Group column.

The rest is easy! Click the desired directory link in the group display and use the Search field as you normally would. Matching entries display the person’s name, e-mail address, and phone number.

“But hey, Mark, what if I’m not online? My company’s LDAP directory isn’t much good then, right?” Normally, that’s true. If you’re a mobile user, LDAP information is available to you only when you’re online and the LDAP server is available. Ah, but here’s a rocking power user tip that’ll do the trick for MacBook owners: To make a person’s information always available, search the LDAP database and drag the resulting entry from the contacts list to the desired group (or the All Contacts link) on the group display. You’ll import the information to your local Contacts database — and you’ll see it even when you’re not online!

Printing Contacts with Flair

Consider how to print your contacts (for those moments when you need an archaic hard copy). Contacts offers a whopping four different formats: mailing labels, envelopes, lists, and even a snappy pocket address book.

By default, Contacts prints on standard U.S. letter-size paper (81⁄2 x 11") in portrait orientation. You can change these settings right from the Print dialog (choose File⇒Print or press +P.) From the Print dialog, you can choose exotic settings, such as legal-size paper or landscape orientation.

Follow these steps to print your contacts:

1. Press +P.

Address Book displays the Print dialog. To show all the settings, click the Show Details button at the bottom of the sheet.

If you need more than one copy, click in the Copies field to specify the desired number.

Need labels? We’ve got ’em! From the Style pop-up menu, choose Mailing Labels to specify what type of label stock you’re using on the Layout pane. Click the Label button to sort your labels by name or postal code, choose a font, select a text color, and add an icon or image to your labels. To switch to a standard contact list, click Style again and then click Lists. (You can also print envelopes and pocket address book pages in a similar manner; just choose the desired entry from the Style pop-up menu.)

2. Select the desired Attributes check boxes to specify which contact card fields you want to appear in your list.

The Attributes list appears only if you’re printing contacts in either the Lists style or the pocket address book style.

3. Click the Print button to send the job to the selected printer.

Alternatively, you can create a PDF file in a specified location, which is a handy trick to use if you’d rather not be burdened with paper, but you still need to consult the list or give it to others. (PDF files are a special document display format developed by Adobe; they display like a printed document but take up minimal space.) To display the contents of a PDF file in OS X, you need only double-click it in the Finder window, and the built-in Preview application is happy to oblige. Even faster, select the PDF file in the Finder window and press the space bar for a Quick Look.

Swapping Bytes with vCards

A vCard is a standard file format for exchanging contact information between programs such as Contacts, Microsoft Entourage and Outlook, Eudora, and the Android operating system. (Heck, if you’re sharp enough to have an iPod, iPhone, or iPad, you can even store vCard data there.) Think of a vCard as an electronic business card that you can attach to an e-mail message, send via File Transfer Protocol (FTP), or exchange with others by using your cellular phone and palmtop computer. vCard files end with the extension .vcf.

In Contacts, you can create a single vCard containing one or more selected entries by choosing File⇒Export⇒Export vCard. Then, like with any other OS X Save dialog, just navigate to the spot where you want the file saved, give it a name, and click Save.

Here are two ways to import vCards into Contacts:

Drag the vCard files that you’ve received to Contacts and drop them in the application window.

Choose File⇒Import (or press +O). From the Open dialog, navigate to the location of the vCard files that you want to add, select them, and then click Open.

The vCard tab in the Contacts Preferences window allows you to choose the format of your exported vCard files. Older devices work only with vCard 2.1 format, while newer applications recognize the improved vCard 3 format. You can also specify whether your exported vCard files will contain the contents of the Notes field and also whether they will include any photos you’ve attached. If you’d rather not provide the private data on your personal (or Me) card in a vCard, make sure that you select the Enable Private Me Card check box.