Thursday, July 06, 2006

Mac Address Book Annoyances

I've been using a Mac for a year and half and I love it. I'm one of the few people I know who use Address Book. It's not great but everything supports it, so the integration is good, and I've enjoyed having pictures in it and seeing people's faces in other apps. I've looked briefly at Entourage but seperate tabs for all the info drove me nuts. And really, how much do you need from an Address Book?

Well two things drove me nuts. First labels on different values of fields (like home and work for email or phone numbers) seemed to change on their own and certainly if I changed them, they didn't always seem to stick. Also if someone had several email addresses it wasn't always the first one that got used when I sent email. And again, I couldn't see a pattern.

Today I think I found easy solutions to both of these. First if you change labels be sure to change from edit to view mode before leaving the card. That seems to be a save. It's dumb if this is needed, but it seems to work. Second, if you select a group you can choose Edit Distribution List from the Edit menu. This brings up a window showing everyone on the list and all their addresses with the used one in bold and lets you change it. This way you can have the same person on different lists using different addresses. This is good but it seemed very hidden to me. Wouldn't you think this would be on the context menu if you control-clicked on a group?

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