Saturday, February 06, 2010

OS X Address Book: How do you show all groups for a Contact?

Once upon a time, an early version of OS X Address Book allowed one to see all the Groups to which an address belonged:
InformIT: Mac OS X Unleashed - Address Book: "the group setup window should appear,"
I don't believe there's a group setup window any more. It's easy to add an address to a group, but I don't think there's away to inspect or interact with an address and find out which groups it belongs to.

I often want to do this, particularly when I deal with duplicate address book entries.

Sigh.

I doubt Apple will fix this. If they ever do crack the hood on Address Book, maybe they could also fix the "Find Duplicates" function - such as provide a "show duplicates" option. Or at least document what the merge behavior really is!

Update 2/26/2010: Per Comment by Kate: "Simple. Select the address card you want to find groups for. Press the option key. The groups the address belongs to will be highlighted." Knowing the answer I searched on this, and found only one reference in an old version of Pogue's "Mac OX X" Missing manual series. How did Kate know this?

Update 2/27/2010: It's in the "manual" (online help). Of course. It's not even hard to find. I searched on "show groups" and found:

Select a contact in the Name column.

Hold down the Option key.

Address Book highlights the groups the contact belongs to in the Groups column. If you have a lot of groups, scroll the list to see all of the highlighted groups.

Total humiliation, total fail.

4 comments:

Kate said...

Simple. Select the address card you want to find groups for. Press the option key. The groups the address belongs to will be highlighted.

JGF said...

How the H*ll did you know that Kate? Even with your answer in hand, the only reference I could find was in an early Pogue missing manual book.

I'll try it as soon as I get home.

Pop! said...

Well, I didn’t know that. Handy!

Knowing the answer now, I just tried Address Book’s Help menu search. The answer is in there too. Note to self: Use the Help menu more.

JGF said...

RTFM. total humiliation.

Maybe Apple should put the manual online so search finds it?

I'm usually good at looking at manuals. Evidently not this time.