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Embarrassment over the address book gave me a good reason to clean up my act.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
The address book blues: How a surprise party turned me into a believer in computerization


Sept. 19, 2004


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard

   When I was trying to plan a surprise party for my wife's birthday, I discovered that we had no backup copies of our address book.
   How could I have been so dumb? Just when I needed the phone numbers of all those old friends I wanted to invite to the surprise party, the address book was AWOL.
   I don't mean the address book on the computer. It was barren. I wasn't in the habit of using it. I'm talking about the one we keep at one corner of the desk. It's the one with pictures of flowers on the cover and a million odd scraps of paper stuck between the pages. You can't miss it.
   But I did miss it the day I tried to get things rolling for the party. My wife had taken the address book to the office, and the last thing I could do was ask her to bring it home. She would have been suspicious right away.
   I know what you're saying. We should have put all those names, phone numbers and addresses into electronic form a long time ago. Then I could have clicked the mouse a few times and found all the entries.
   I have an excuse, of course. I was busy.
   Which means, if you know how the male mind works, that I was hoping somebody else would do all that for me. But in our household, the only other certified 100 percent genuine fellow human being is my wife. The parrot doesn't count, even though he talks like a swiftboat captain and sings like Frank Sinatra. The dogs don't count, either, even though they're each almost as big as a 100 percent genuine certified human.
   So the only "somebody else" who could qualify is my wife, and she's even less interested than I am in typing 300 names and addresses into the computer.
   Which brings me back to that surprise party. Disaster turned into success because our friends stepped in to help. But my embarrassment over the address book gave me a good reason to clean up my act. I got serious about my computerized lists.
   Kind souls who already know that I use an Apple computer, not a Windows PC, should resist comments at this point. Mac users can be just as pigheaded as Windows users. And both sides can learn from the mistakes of others.
   I knew that fixing the problem wouldn't be hard, but first I had to locate the address book. Don't laugh. On my computer and probably on yours, the address book usually shows up only when you're doing e-mail. I wanted to find a way to get to it even when I wasn't running the mail. I located in the folder holding the main programs (called "Applications" on my computer).
   Then I made sure I had a launch icon for the address book so I'd be able to run it with a quick click or two. A launch shortcut on the desktop works fine. So does a shortcut on the Windows launchbar or the Mac dock.
   Next, I created a bunch of fake addresses, making sure I used all possible fields each time. Later, I opened the address book and looked at the way each entry presented itself. This helped a lot, because I found some fields were handy for just about any information while others seemed designed by someone who worked for the phone company. A field labeled "Notes" turned out to be perfect for the haphazard way I've kept notes over the years. I was able to store my sister's questions about the next family get-together right below her phone number, for example.
   I also found a great way to store software registration codes. I created entries named for programs I used that required registration codes, including many shareware programs I'd purchased for a few dollars over the Internet. For a program named, for example, EasyText, I created an entry named "EasyText" and typed the registration information into the "Notes" field.
   Finding information is easy. I simply use the address book's "Search" function, which looks in all the fields. (I can do fancier searches, and you probably can, too, but unless you have thousands of names, a simple search works OK.)
   Best of all, I've got the names, addresses and phone numbers I need (and the odd bits of information that go with them) right in front of me any time I'm working at my computer. I realize I'm behind the times, but I've finally caught up, and now I'm armed and ready to go for that next surprise party.
   But please don't tell my wife.