Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Tiger Edition

Address Book

Address Book is Mac OS X's little-black-book program—an electronic Rolodex where you can stash the names, job titles, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and Internet chat screen names of all the people in your life (Figure 20-15). Address Book can hold other related information too, such as birthdays and anniversaries, as well as any other tidbits of personal data you'd like to keep at your fingertips.

Once you make Address Book the central repository of all your personal contact information, you can call up this information in a number of convenient ways:

• You can launch Address Book and search for a contact by typing just a few letters in the Search box.

• Regardless of what program you're in, you can use a single keystroke (F12 by default) to summon the Address Book Dashboard widget (Section 5.11.3). There, you can search for any contact you want, and hide the widget with the same quick keystroke when you're done.

• When you're composing messages in Mac OS X's Mail program, Address Book automatically fills in email addresses for you when you type the first few letters.

  Tip

  If you choose Window→Address Panel (Option-c-A) from within Mail, you can browse all of your addresses without even launching the Address Book program. Once you've selected the people you want to contact, just click the "To:" button to address an email to them—or, if you already have a new email message open, to add them to the recipients.

• When you use iChat to exchange instant messages with people ...