Today I received a phone call from my mother, who, after having bought her first computer (a snow iMac 500), needed help printing a list of names and addresses from her address book in Jaguar.
She'd intuitively separated the names, numbers and addresses into different groups and now wanted to print the contents of one of said groups to have a a hard-copy reference. She could not, she said, find a way to do it.
Assuming that there must be a simple solution, but having never tried this myself, I set out to print a list from my own address book. Guess what? You can't.
Well, you CAN, rather, but it's the most counter-intuitive and graceless thing you could imagine. Basically, Address Book will let you print a list of names with EITHER phone numbers OR e-mail addresses (a choice you have to make by selecting 'Address Book' in one of drop-down fields of the print dialog box). If you want to print actual ADDRESSES (it IS an address book, after all), Apple suggests a few options...
The first is to select all of the entries you want, then export them as vCards, then open the vCard file in a text editor or word processor, then print.
The second is to do the same, but open the vCard file in a vCard compatible application, assuming you have one.
The third is to use a third-party application (Apple recommends a piece of software called iDress, which I checked out quickly and seems more than capable).
I told my mom to use option one. Not knowing what on earth a vCard is, I had to walk her through the process, finally ending up with a stream of text in TextEdit that looked like gibberish. All of the information was there, of course, but without a lot of editing the printout leaves a great deal to be desired, and it's not exactly an easy reference for the fridge door.
I apologised to her as though it was my fault this was such an ordeal, then decided that I'd post the story here to see if anyone had a better solution.
I hope this lack of obvious functionality is corrected in Panther. I guess I've come to take for granted the ease of use and elegance of Apple's products, and this just sort of threw me. I'll post a suggestion to Apple's boards as well, in hopes of effecting change.
On the plus side, however, my mother absolutely adores her iMac and has taken quickly to basic computing. It's very cute.
She'd intuitively separated the names, numbers and addresses into different groups and now wanted to print the contents of one of said groups to have a a hard-copy reference. She could not, she said, find a way to do it.
Assuming that there must be a simple solution, but having never tried this myself, I set out to print a list from my own address book. Guess what? You can't.
Well, you CAN, rather, but it's the most counter-intuitive and graceless thing you could imagine. Basically, Address Book will let you print a list of names with EITHER phone numbers OR e-mail addresses (a choice you have to make by selecting 'Address Book' in one of drop-down fields of the print dialog box). If you want to print actual ADDRESSES (it IS an address book, after all), Apple suggests a few options...
The first is to select all of the entries you want, then export them as vCards, then open the vCard file in a text editor or word processor, then print.
The second is to do the same, but open the vCard file in a vCard compatible application, assuming you have one.
The third is to use a third-party application (Apple recommends a piece of software called iDress, which I checked out quickly and seems more than capable).
I told my mom to use option one. Not knowing what on earth a vCard is, I had to walk her through the process, finally ending up with a stream of text in TextEdit that looked like gibberish. All of the information was there, of course, but without a lot of editing the printout leaves a great deal to be desired, and it's not exactly an easy reference for the fridge door.
I apologised to her as though it was my fault this was such an ordeal, then decided that I'd post the story here to see if anyone had a better solution.
I hope this lack of obvious functionality is corrected in Panther. I guess I've come to take for granted the ease of use and elegance of Apple's products, and this just sort of threw me. I'll post a suggestion to Apple's boards as well, in hopes of effecting change.
On the plus side, however, my mother absolutely adores her iMac and has taken quickly to basic computing. It's very cute.
