Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

chapter 10: entourage address book and notes 401

chapter

10

M

icrosoft clearly hopes that Entourage will be the only personal informa-

tion manager you’ll ever need. As proof, it offers a built-in Rolodex func-

tion that serves as a master name/address/phone number/photo gallery/

email address book for Office X, and a Notes module that lets you write pithy com-

ments about everybody you know.

But make no mistake: the names, numbers, and comments you store in these pro-

grams don’t just sit there, locked away in a stand-alone database. In fact, you’ll often

consult your electronic little black book from within the other Office programs.

For example, once your Address Book contains a few names, Entourage can

autocomplete addresses as you start typing in the To field of email messages. It can

also fetch the phone numbers of people you’re inviting to events that you schedule

in Entourage’s calendar. You can also easily include address book information in

Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.

Address Book

The Address Book isn’t a separate application that you double-click when you want

to look up something; it’s just one module of Entourage. You view it by clicking the

Address Book icon in the upper left of Entourage’s main window, by choosing

View→Go To→Address Book, by pressing c-2 (and probably in dozens of other

ways).

Entourage Address

Book and Notes

402 office x for macintosh: the missing manual

Tip: As with email in Entourage, you can opt to view your address book either as a single pane of the

Entourage screen, as shown in Figure 10-1, or in a window of its own. To do the latter, Control-click the

Address Book icon in the Entourage main window and choose Open Address Book in New Window from

the contextual menu that appears.

A Tour of Address Book World

The Address Book interface parallels Entourage’s email view, which shows a list of

messages above, the body of the highlighted message below. In the Address Book,

when you click someone’s name in the list above, you get a detailed view beneath.

Sometimes you’ll have recorded only a name; sometimes you’ll have gone whole-hog,

recording that person’s mailing addresses, anniversary, astrological sign, and so on.

You also manipulate the Address Book list view exactly as you do with email. For

example, you navigate the list and highlight selected names exactly the same way

(see page 330). And you manipulate the various columns of address information

just as you would with email messages. The columns give you at-a-glance informa-

tion about your acquaintances—whether they have any links or flags, the person’s

name, company, phone numbers, email address, and category.

Tip: Entourage can show you over 40 columns of information about each person in your address book.

Unless you have either (a) a 70-inch monitor, or (b) some kind of weird obsession with detail, you can

probably get by with a subset of these. To specify which columns show up in the list view, select them from

the View→Columns submenu.

Address Book

Figure 10-1:

Much like the Entourage Mail

module, the Address Book

window has a Preview pane

showing a list up top,

detailed information down

below. It reveals the last time

you sent a message to—or

received a message from—the

person whose name is

highlighted, along with a

plethora of other informa-

tion. Like the Mail and News

modules, the Address Book

module has a quick-find filter

in the upper-right corner. To

find a certain person’s

information quickly, type a

few letters of his name into

this box. Entourage instantly

hides all names that don’t

match what you typed.

Toolbar List view Address filter

Detail view Information bar