Address Book and vCards – Use them!

How many times has someone sent me information about themselves and I have had to copy/paste it into my address book? too many times

Did you know that if you open address book, you can drag your card, with all of your data on it, into mail.app very easily?

Just:

  • Open Address Book
  • Choose “Go to my card” from the “Card” menu
  • Click and hold the icon of the card in the title bar. It will tear off
  • Drag card icon into email window and release

That is easy! Click here for a movie to show you this in action.

Now what if you have phone numbers, emails and addresses that you don’t want to give out to the general person? Use a private vCard. First, use Preferences from the Address Book to enable private vCards:

private vcard pref

Now, go to your card as listed above and edit it by choosing “Edit Card” from the “Edit Menu”

Notice now, that on your card only, you have some blue checkboxes. If you uncheck these, then that data will not be exported when you give someone your vCard! Notice how I have hidden private data:

private vcard

Please use this as when someone gets your vCard in an email, they can simply double click it and have it installed into Address Book. also, the vCard format is standard, so it may work in other applications and even on Windows! Maybe.

P.S. A vCard is simply a standardized format for sharing the kinds of data that appear in an address book like program.

1 comment

Comments are closed.