MacinSpot

If you have a ton of contacts and a ton of duplicate contacts then you can quickly sort them out and merge the duplicates together. Address Book has a built in “search for duplicates” tool. This tool only searches for duplicates by name and then analyzes the content under each duplicate. It will not search for duplicate number or email address or anything else. Once it comes across a duplicate entry by name, it will then ask you if you would like to merge the duplicates. To get to this tool, open up the address book and click on the card menu.

Click on the “Look for Duplicates” option and Address Book will immediately start going through your contacts database looking for duplicates. If a duplicate is found it will ask you if you would like to merge the two, therefore making one contact from the two cards. It will combine any information in the two cards that might be different to make one contact. Merging contacts is okay. You will not loose any information entered into either contact card. To be sure, you can always backup your contacts manually before starting just to make sure. Read my article about manually backing up your address book.

There may come a day when you want to manually backup your contacts on the Mac OS. Reasons may vary, but once you have this database file and you want to put your contacts back into address book, it is super easy as all that needs to be done is a simple double-click on the file that gets created at the end of this tutorial. To start, open up your address book, and if you don’t know which icon it is on your dock, it should like something like this:

Once open navigate to the File menu at the top of the screen and hover your mouse over export. A sub menu should pop out to the side.

Select “Address Book Archive…” by single clicking on it. A drop down box should appear over your Address Book application:

Create a name for the output file, or the backup file containing all of your contacts. By default Address Book will use the name of itself, and the date in which you are creating it which I think is a good idea if you plan on creating more backups in the future or you keep a lot of contacts and are constantly updating the contacts database. Select a destination to save this file, such as the desktop or the documents folder by clicking the drop down box. After you click “Save” a file will be saved to the location you specified.

If you ever need to revert back to one of these archives, all you have to do, as stated above, is double-click on it. Address Book will automatically open and if any duplicates are found in your current contacts database, Address Book will ask to overwrite them. You can simply say “Replace All” and the job is done.

Mac OS X 10.5 or Leopard as it’s more widely known as, comes with a great built in function. The ability to print mailing labels without any extra software. You can print straight out of the Address Book application to your blank Avery label sheets. Let’s figure out how.

Open up your Address Book application, it’s the icon on your dock with the @ symbol engraved in a book. After this is open, go to the file menu in the upper left of your screen and select print. This window will pop up probably with a different printer selected:

Select the printer you want to print to then click the down arrow to the right of the printers name. This will give you an options screen that gives you more control over what the printer prints. It should look something like this:

About halfway down you will see an option called style. Click the drop down menu to the right of that and you should see an option to print mailing labels.

Once selected your options screen will change a little bit and you should have two tabs under style. One will be layout, and one will be label. It should look a little bit like this:

If you click on the label tab you will find the top two choices to be the addresses you would to print and the order in which you would like to print them. You can create groups in Address Book and print individual groups. For instance, you may have a personal group, and a business group. You can print either of the two groups without printing anything from the group not chosen. Below these two choices you can select whether you want the company name and country to be printed out as well on each individual label. This is handy when sending over seas. Then last on this page is the color you would like the font to be, font type and if you really want to drain your ink cartridges, you can print an image on each label.

Now if you select the layout tab towards the middle of this options screen, you get something of this nature:

For the page option select Avery Standard and then to the right of that, select the number associated with your blank Avery label sheets. There are other options in the page drop down as well such as DYMO or Avery A4 if you are using a diferent style label sheet. Check on the left side to make sure the preview looks correct and click that print button in the bottom right corner.

Thats it!