The Best Address Book for the Mac

It’s easy to neglect your personal contacts on your Mac. For starters your phone is probably where you are most likely to reach out to people — make calls, write text messages, set appointments, even fire off an email. This is why I said in a previous post that it’s important to keep your iPhone’s address book up-to-date.

Here’s the Big Idea for the Mac and why you need to get your Contacts database organized- Spotlight Search. Click on the magnifying glass in your menu bar (I use COMMAND — SPACEBAR) and enter a person’s name, company or contact group and you’ll get a list with all the contact information, emails, phone calls, iMessages, documents, calendar entries, and related contacts that are associated with your search terms. It’s pretty amazing.

To make Spotlight effective however, you need to do a little grooming of your Contacts database. Make sure your contacts have accurate phone numbers, Twitter handles, LinkedIn names. Put your contacts in groups such as Family, Medical, Business. Finally, when set up a calendar entry make sure that you list people’s names in the Notes field for the calendar entry.

Why Not Just Use Apple’s Contacts App?

You can easily do most of this work inContacts, Apple’s built-in address book for the Mac. The power feature of Contacts is the ability to…