# Working with Your Contacts

This chapter will show you how to use the Evolution addressbook to organize any amount of contact information, share addresses over a network, and several ways to save time with everyday tasks. To learn about configuring the addressbook, see config-prefs-contact. You can import contacts from other contact management tools with the Import tool by selecting File Import, or by mailing them to yourself as vCard attachments.

The toolbar for the addressbook is quite simple.

- Click New Contact to create a new card, or double-click in a blank space in the contact list.

- Click New List to create a new card, or double-click in a blank space in the contact list.

- The printer icon sends one or more of your cards to the printer.

- The stop sign icon stops loading contact data from the network. This button is only relevant if you are looking at contact information on a network.

Your contact information fills the rest of the display. Move through the cards alphabetically with the buttons and the scrollbar to the right of the window. Of course, if you have more than a few people listed, you'll want some way of finding them more quickly, which is why there's a search feature.

## The Contact Editor

To delete a contact:

1. Click once on the contact.

2. Press the Delete button.

If you want to add or change cards, you'll use the contact editor. To change a card that already exists, double click on it to open the contact editor window. If you want to create a new card, clicking the New button in the toolbar will open the same window, with blank entry boxes for you to fill in.

The contact editor window has two tabs, General, for basic contact information, and Details, for a more specific description of the person. In addition, it contains a File menu and a toolbar with three items: Save and Close, Print, and Delete.

### Evolution Contact Editor

Evolution Contact Editor

The General tab has seven sections, each with an icon: a face, for name and company; a telephone for phone numbers; an envelope for email address; a globe for web page address; a house for postal address; a file folder for contacts, and a briefcase for categories.

Full Name

- The Full Name field has two major features:

  - You can enter a name into the Full Name field, but you can also click the Full Name button to bring up a small dialog box with a few text boxes

    Title:

  - Enter an honorific or select one from the menu.

First:

- Enter the first, or given, name.

Middle:

- Enter the middle name or initial, if any.

Last:

- Enter the last name (surname).

Suffix:

- Enter suffixes such as "Jr." or "III."

The Full Name field also interacts with the File As box to help you organize your contacts.

To see how it works, type a name in the Full Name field. As an example, we'll use the Ximian mascot, `Rupert T. Monkey`. You'll notice that the File As field also fills in, but in reverse: `Monkey, Rupert`. You can pick `Rupert Monkey` from the drop-down, or type in your own, such as `T. Rupert Monkey` .

### Filing Suggestion

Don't enter something entirely different from the actual name, since you might forget that you've filed Rupert's information under "F" for "Fictitious Ximian Employee."

Multiple Values for Fields:

- If you click on the downward pointing triangle buttons next to the Primary Email field, you can also choose Email 2 and Email 3. Although the contact editor will only display one of those at any given time, Evolution will store them all. Entries that have information in them have a check mark next to them. The buttons next to the telephone and postal address fields work in the same way.

The last item in the General tab is the Categories organization tool; for information on that, read usage-contact-organize.

The Details tab is much simpler:

- The briefcase - Describes the person's professional life

- The face - Describes the person's personal life

- The globe - Miscellanious notes

### Contact Shortcuts

You can add cards from within an email message or calendar appointment. While looking at an email, right-click on any email address or message, and choose Create Card for this Address or Create Card for this Sender from the menu.

## Searching for Contacts

Evolution allows searching through contacts quickly and easily.

To search through contacts:

1. Select your search focus in the search bar.

2. Enter your query.

3. Press return to search.

You can refine searches by doing several in succession, or start over by pressing the Show All button.

If there are no matches, the card display will be blank. When you'd like to see all the cards again, press Show All.

### Refining a Quick Search

Tom comes back from lunch and finds a note on his keyboard: "Curtis in sales called for you, but he didn't leave a number, and I forgot to write down the name of the company he works for. He said it was important, though." Tom is not at all annoyed.

He opens his contacts folder, and runs a quick search for "Curtis." There are eighteen different people with that name in the file. He then enters "Sales," and Evolution narrows it down to the right Curtis. He only becomes annoyed when he discovers that the call was not actually important.

To perform a complex search through your contacts:

1. Open Tools Search for contacts

2. Name the rule in the Rule Name field.

3. Setup your criteria information in the If section.

4. If you want to add more critera, click the Add Criterion button.

5. Click Search.

To show all your contacts, select Show All in the Search Bar or search with an empty query.

## Organizing your Addressbook

Organizing your addressbook is a lot like organizing your mail. You can have folders and searches the same way you can with mail, but the addressbook does not allow Virtual Folders. It does, however, allow each card to fall under several categories, and allow you to create your own categories. To learn about categories, read usage-contact-organize-group-category.

### Groups of contacts

Evolution offers two ways for you to organize your cards. The first way is to use folders; this works the same way mail folders do. For more flexibility, you can also mark contacts as elements of different categories. To better integrate with email tools, you can also create lists of contacts that you can send mail to as a single person.

#### Grouping with Folders

The simplest way to group address cards is to use folders. By default, cards start in the Contacts folder. If you've read usage-mainwindow then you already know that you can create a new folder by selecting File New Folder and that you can put new folders anywhere you like. Just like with mail, cards must be in a card folder, and no card can be in two places at once. If you want more flexibility, try usage-contact-organize-group-category.

To put a card into a folder, just drag it there from the folder view. Remember that contact cards can only go in contact folders, just like mail can only go in mail folders, and calendars in calendar folders.

#### Grouping with Categories

The other way to group cards is to mark them as belonging to different categories. That means that you can mark a card as being in several categories or no category at all. For example, I put my friend Matthew's card in the "Business" category, because he works with me, the "Friends" category, because he's also my friend, and the "Frequent" category, because I call him all the time and can never remember his phone number.

To mark a card as belonging to a category, click the Categories button at the lower right. From the dialog box that appears, you can check as many or as few categories as you like.

#### Creating a List of Contacts

To create a list of contacts:

1. Open the list creation dialog box by clicking the New List button or selecting File New Contact List .

2. Enter a name for the list.

3. Enter names or email addresses of contacts, or just drag contacts from the main window into the list.

4. Choose whether you would like to hide the email addresses when you send a message to the list. Unless it is a very small list, it is recommended that you leave the addresses hidden. This is the same thing as using the "Bcc:" feature discussed in usage-mail-getnsend-send-to-types.

When you are done, click OK. The list will appear as a contact card, which you can use as you would any other. That includes emailing the list to another person, and, of course, sending email to the list.

To mail the list, open a new email and type the name you chose for the list. Ximian Evolution will address the message to the entire list when you send it. You can also right-click on the list's address card in the Addressbook and select Send Message to List.

## Sharing your Cards

If you keep your cards on a network using an LDAP server, you can share access to them, browse other peoples addressbooks, or maintain a shared set of contact information for your company or your department. This is the sort of feature you'll want to use if your company has a list of vendors and clients that needs constant updating. If you share calendars as well as addressbooks, people can avoid duplicating work and keep up to date on developments within their workgroup or across the entire company.

### Sharing Address Cards and Calendar Data

Ray wants to schedule a meeting with Company X, so he checks the network for the Company X address card so he knows whom to call there. Since his company also shares calendars, he then learns that his co-worker Deanna has already scheduled a meeting with Company X next Thursday. He can either go to the meeting himself or ask Deanna to discuss his concerns for him. Either way, he avoids scheduling an extra meeting with Company X.

Of course, you don't want to share all of your cards— why overload the network with a list of babysitters or tell everyone in the office you're talking to new job prospects? If you keep cards on your own computer, you can decide which items you want to make accessible to others.

To learn how to add a remote directory to your available contact folders, see config-prefs-contact. Once you have a connection, the network contacts folder or folders will appear inside the External Directories folder in the folder bar. It will work exactly like a local folder of cards, with the following exceptions:

- Network folders are only available when you are connected to the network. If you use a laptop or have a modem connection, you may wish to copy or cache the network directory. You do this by dragging and dropping your desired contacts into the local contacts list.

- To prevent excess network traffic, Evolution will not normally load the contents of LDAP folders immediately upon opening. You must click Display All before LDAP folder cards will be loaded from the network. You can change this behavior in the Contact Preferences window.

- Your ability to view, change, add, and delete contacts depends on the settings of the LDAP server.

## Send me a Card: Adding New Cards Quickly

As noted before, when you get information about a person in the mail or in a calendar entry, you can add it to an address card. To do so, right click on any email address or email message, and select Add Address Card from the menu that appears. Of course, Evolution can also add cards from a hand-held device during HotSync operation. For more information about that, see usage-sync.