The Evolution address book can handle all of the functions of an address book, phone book, or Rolodex. Of course, it's a lot easier to update Evolution than it is to change an actual paper book. Evolution also allows easy synchronization with hand-held devices. Since Evolution supports the LDAP directory protocol, you can use it with almost any type of existing directory server on your network. Another advantage of the Evolution address book is its integration with the rest of the application. When you look for someone's address, you can also see a history of appointments with that person. Or, you can create address cards from emails with just a few clicks. In addition, searches and folders work in the same way they do in the rest of Evolution. This chapter will show you how to use the Evolution address book 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 address book, see . To open up your address book, click on Contacts in the shortcut bar, or select one of your contacts folders from the folder bar. shows the address book in all its organizational glory. By default, the address book shows all your cards in alphabetical order, in a minicard format. You can select other views from the View menu, and adjust the width of the columns by clicking and dragging the grey column dividers.

Evolution Address Book Window

The toolbar for the address book is quite simple: New creates a new card. Find brings up an in-depth search window. Print sends one or more of your cards to the printer. Delete deletes a selected card. View All displays all the address information in the folder. Use this button to refresh the display for a network folder, or to switch from viewing the results of a search and see the whole contents. Stop 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 at 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. Between Delete and View All is a quick search field. To use it, select from the drop-down list which sort of search you'd like to perform (the whole card, just the name, or just the email address), then enter one or more words in the text entry box, and press Enter. Evolution will search through the contents of every displayed card to find one that matches. You can refine searches by doing several in succession, or start over by pressing the View 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. 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. If you prefer to perform a more complex search, press Find or choose ToolsSearch for Contact. This will open the in-depth search window, which lets you use multiple search criteria in the same way that email filters and virtual folders do.. Click Add Criterion to increase the number of criteria you'd like to use in the search, and Remove Criterion to remove one from the bottom of the list. Your criteria may be a search within the Name or Email fields; alternately you can choose to search through all the fields with a regular expression. Then, you can select from all the familiar requirements like Begins With and Does Not Contain, decide whether to match All or Any of your criteria, and press Search to set it all off. To delete a card, click on it once to select it, then press the Delete button. If you have multiple cards selected, you'll delete multiple cards. 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 with all the current information already filled in. If you want to create a new one, 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, (see ) and a toolbar with three items: Save and Close, Print, and Delete.

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: Rupert T. Monkey. You'll notice that the File As field also fills up, but in reverse: Monkey, Rupert. You can pick Rupert Monkey from the drop-down, or type in your own, such as T. Rupert Monkey . 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 small arrow 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. The arrow 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 . The Details tab is, fortunately, much more simple: three sections, all of which are more or less obvious: the briefcase next to the details about the contact's professional life; the face next to the details about their personal life; the globe next to a big blank space you can use for anything and everything else you'd like to note about them. If you ever wanted to have that uncanny knack for remembering obscure details like the date of someone's anniversary (perhaps your own) this is the way to develop it. Organizing your address book is a lot like organizing your mail. You can have folders and searches the same way you can with mail, but the address book does not allow vFolders. It does, however, allow each card to fall under several categories, and allow you to create your own categories. To learn about categories, read . Evolution offers two ways for you to organize your cards. The first way is to use folders; this works the same way that mail folders do. For more flexibility, you can also mark contacts as members of different categories. The simplest way to group address cards is to use folders. By default, cards start in the Contacts folder. If you've read 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 . 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. The other way to group cards is to mark them as belonging to different categories. The difference between folders and categories is that folders contain cards, but category membership is a property of each card. 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. Then, you can refer to all the cards in that category by: Waiting for Evolution to support the operation. If you keep your cards on a network using an LDAP server, you can share access to them, browse other address books, 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 share calendars as well as address books, people can avoid duplicating work and keep up to date on developments within their work-group or across the entire company. 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 . 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 and then synchronize your copy with the networked version periodically. 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. The address book works closely with Evolution's mail and calendar tools. For example, you can use the address book to help you manage mailing lists, and send or recieve address cards over email. More tools are on the way, and when they arrive, they will be described in this section. 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 also adds cards from a hand-held device during HotSync operation. For more information about that, see . You already know that when you are writing an email, you can address it to one or more people, and that Evolution will fill in addresses from your address book's address cards if you let it. In addition to that, you can send email to everyone in a particular group if you choose.