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 the section called Managing the Contact Manager in Chapter 9.
To open up your address book, click on Contacts in the shortcut bar, or select one of your contacts folders from the folder bar. Figure 4-1 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.
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.
Example 4-1. 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.
If you prefer to perform a more complex search, press Find or choose Tools->Search 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.