John Michl

I’ve been cleaning up my address book while watching bowl games in hopes of actually using the list to send Christmas next year.  (You can never start planning too early!)  Since I typically keep separate address cards for each member of a family, I use Address Book’s “spouse” field to combine labels.  I’ll also use a Smart Group for managing the group here’s how.

Tagging for Smart Groups – Not sure how you do it but I use the Notes field of the address card to “tag” a card for inclusion in certain Smart Groups.  Granted you could just type the phrase “Christmas Cards” or something similar but I prefer to include a tilde in the tag and remove all spaces for the phrase.  In my example, I’m using the tag “~ChristmasCards” to represent everyone who should receive a card.  This method allows me to easily separate other notes in the field from my intended tags.  Here’s a screen shot of the Smart Group that searches for the ~ChristmasCard tag.  (Note I used the singular form in the query since it will pull both singular and plural versions from the notes field. My intent is to use ~ChristmasCards in the field but this will catch both in case I slip.)

For this example, I created two sample cards: John Doe and Jane Doe.  Note that in each, I added the spouse field and used the full name of the spouse.  See the images of the two cards.  Note also that both cards include the ~Sample tag but only John has the ~ChristmasCards tag.  That’s because I only want to print one envelope or label.  In this case, an envelope will print for John and it will include his spouse, Jane, in the first line.

Since John and Jane are linked via the spouse and address fields and they have the same last name, the label only adds Jane’s first name.  If Jane’s last name is different from John’s, then her full name would print. Here’s the result:

In this example, I changed his last name to Buck.  Note that since the records are actually connected, I also needed to manually change Jane’s spouse to John Buck.  Once that is complete, the new label for John looks like this:

So there you have it.  Two address cards but one label with both names.  Now there is a catch.  For some reason, Apple removed this function in Snow Leopard so users of Mac OS X 10.6 will need to take a few extra steps.  See those in the next post.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 2nd, 2010 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Mac, Software, Switch to Mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.