Edit the Address Book Template

Set up a template for the format of your Apple Address Book’s cards.

Edit the Address Book Template
Mac Tip #142/24-Mar-2004

Your Address Book can contain all kinds of information, including birthdays, nicknames, related names (eg friend, partner, manager). It’s a nuisance though when you go to create a new entry to have to fight your way through hundreds of fields you have no intention of filling in.

That’s where the Template comes in. If all you want is a bare bones name, home address, phone number then you can set up Address Book to present you only with those items. You can still access the others if you want them later.

On the other hand, if you always want to see several phone number and address fields, fax numbers, boss’s name etc then you can do that too.

Open Address Book. Go to the Address Book menu and choose Preferences…

Edit the Address Book template to contain the fields you want.

Click on the tab for Template. From the drop-down box choose the type of field you’d like to add.

Once it’s been added into the template as displayed in the lower part of the window use the arrows beside the field names to choose the exact type.

For example, if you add a “Related Names” field then you could specify that it would be for “friend”. If you now want more related names then click the green plus sign for further possibilities.

If there’s a field you don’t want then click the red minus sign to remove it.

Now close up Preferences and you’ll find if you go to add a new name it’ll contain the fields you set up.

Tagged as: Address Book, fields, names, template

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* 2 comments… read them below and tell us what you think.

Wieland 1 24 March 2004 at 16:25:14: This must be Panther-specific. Under Jaguar there is a menu option CARD | ADD FIELD and one can choose ‘Phonetic First/Last Name’, ‘Birthday’ and ‘Instant Messaging’ (ICQ, Jabber, MSN, Yahoo).

Miraz 2 24 March 2004 at 17:06:09: Yup. Back in Tip 139 I said: “If you have an older version you may find some features I mention in these Tips don’t exist. I’m using Address Book 3.1.1 (v301) which came with Panther.” Panther has brought many subtle changes. Quite a few of them affect the Address Book. Well spotted!