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 ype" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> The Entourage User's WebLog
Getting at the Address Book
2006-06-14 • Reviews
The Entourage address book is a great part of the programme. It is powerful, flexible and well integrated with the rest of the Office suite. However, switching to the address book view and looking for a name, or even having to fire up Entourage when you want to find an address can be a pain. Fortunately, there's an easier way!

Jonathan Nathan has written a great little utility called "Entourage AB Menu" that puts a little purple 'e' icon in the menu bar.
menu_main
Select this icon and you get a list of all your address book contacts, selectable by name, by category, by company, by geographical area etc. By drilling down these hierarchical menus (which work very quickly) you can select the contact you want.

Here stuff gets even more fancy, in the preferences, you can decide what happens when you select each type of data. By default, select the name and the contact opens in Entourage for editing; select the address and it is copied to the clipboard; select the phone number and it is dialled through the speaker etc.

There's lots of control over what the utility does, through the preferences window. In fact, there are so many options that the preferences window looks cluttered and a little overwhelming at first, but take your time and look through all the options one by one.

Installation is easy. Just download the disk image, then drag the application to your Applications folder (or anywhere else, come to that) and double-click it to make it run. Because its an application, there is no great interference with the OS and it appears to be rock-solid stable. First time you run it you get to set the prefs which includes an option to start the utility when you log in. EntourageABmenu is $10 shareware, but you get to use all the functions in an unregistered version for up to 30 minutes at a time - when the 30 minutes expires you can launch it again.


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