Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

Contacts

Contacts is 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. It can also hold related information, like birthdays, anniversaries, and any other tidbits of personal data you’d like to keep at your fingertips (Figure 11-14).

The best part: It’s centralized. This one address list appears everywhere: in Mail, Messages, and so on. And it synchronizes with your iPhone, iPad, and (via iCloud) your other computers.

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

• You can open Contacts and then 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 (the key on aluminum keyboards) to summon the Contacts Dashboard widget. There you can search for any contact you want. When you’re done, hide the widget with the same quick keystroke.

  

  Figure 11-14. Contacts is meant to look like a physical address book. On the left, the full list of names; on the right, the card for the one person whose name you’ve clicked. (You can hide the names list by choosing View→Card ...