Contacts: An Address Book in Groups

The contact area is a plain address book that lives in your account instead of on one particular device. It is meant for the addresses you look up rather than dial: the plumber, the school, the three suppliers, the people your phone lost the last time you changed it. Contacts are filed in groups, the groups sit in the left panel, and the contacts of the selected group fill the middle column.

Groups

The plus in the header of the group panel creates a group; you give it a name and, if you want, a colored icon. The pencil renames it, the wastebasket deletes it, and a group has to be empty before it can go, so move or delete its contacts first.

Groups can be nested. Take one by its icon and drag it: up and down changes the position, left and right changes the level, so a group pulled to the right ends up inside the one above it.

What a contact holds

A contact starts with the name: first name, last name and a nickname, plus a setting that decides how the entry is displayed in the list, since some people are easier found under their company name or their nickname than under a surname.

After that come the fields you would expect: company, street, ZIP code, city, state and country; phone at home, mobile and phone at work; email at home and email at work; a homepage; a birthday; and a free remarks field for everything that does not fit the rest.

Adding and changing

With a group selected, the plus above the contact list opens the form, the pencil edits the selected contact and the wastebasket deletes the selection. Selecting a contact means clicking into a free part of its row: a click on the name selects the name itself, so that you can copy it out. Several at once by dragging over the rows, or with SHIFT and CTRL.

Bringing an address book with you

Premium accounts can import and export vCard files, the format every phone and mail program can write, and can also read contacts out of an Excel file. That is the way to move an existing address book in without typing it twice. Independently of that, the backup in the settings writes the whole account, contacts included, into a single file that can be read back later.

Limits

A free account is limited in the number of groups and contacts, a Premium account is not. The figures stand in the account comparison.