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Twisting Open Contacts

There are countless scenarios of using contact info. We would not design features for every scenarios, but provide flexibilities for you to aggregate some features to form a new feature for a particular scenario. We would like to provide a few examples here before you twist Open Contacts.

Split the database into two or more

At the beginning, you have only one address book database "default.gdb" with all your contacts. Later on as the number of contacts is growing, you might be thinking of move some of the contacts for example those customers into another address book database.

Please follow the steps below.

1. Create a new personal folder and copy data files of existing personal folder of Open Contacts. Please refer to chapter "Multiple Databases" of the user manual.

2. Open the source address book, delete contacts which should go to the new address book.

3. Open the new address book through the new shortcut, delete contacts that should stay in the source database.

It is recommended that you make a backup before doing deletion.

In addition, to avoid confusion, you may give each database an alias name. Please check the Database tab of the Options window to name the database.

There can be another approach of splitting the database.  Sometimes you might want to more some contact info to a destination database which is initially blank or with other contact info not in the source database. In this case, you may just export selected contacts with options in order to export categories and relationships as well. Then import the XML to the destination database.

Delete contacts to virtual Recycle Tray

Open Contacts does not provide a recycle bin for deleted contacts. Deleted contacts are physically deleted from the database. If you want to give deleted contact info a chance to be restored, you may export them into XML files before deleting. If you want to store, just import a desired XML file, and save the contacts into a category for further analysis.

Print mailing labels with dedicated professional labeling programs

Open Contacts provides a few built-in functions for printing selected contact info. If you want to further decorate the layouts, it is more appropriate to use a professional dedicated label printing program to do the job.

  1. Export selected fields of selected contacts to a CSV/Excel file.
  2. Import the CSV/Excel file into the label printing program, and print with a desired format.

Please refer to chapter "Export -- Export to CSV/Excel" and chapter "Print" in the user manual.

Publish online readonly address book

Sometimes you might want to keep a copy of selected contacts sitting on your personal web page with protection, so you can access it everywhere by you only. You just need to export selected contacts to a HTML file, and publish it to your web site. An easy example is that you send the HTML content to your Web mail account.

Alternatively, you may publish an XML file, then on your web site you arrange a style sheet to render the XML into HTML.

In addition, before exporting data to HTML, you may make a style sheet to limit the data to be rendered. However, you might need some decent knowledge/skill of using XML and style sheet. If you are interested in learning by yourself, there's a good website for beginner, please visit http://www.w3schools.com/ .

Export to online address book

You might have a web mail address. The web service provider generally supports importing from CSV, LDIF and vCard etc. So you can just export selected contacts to CSV or vCard files then import them into the web service.

For example, Yahoo Mail supports importing from a vCard file containing multiple cards. Thus you can export selected contacts into a vCard file. Please make sure in the Import/Export tab of the Options window, checkbox "Multiple contacts in one vCard" is checked.

As vCard has limited supports for newer applications like instant messengers, you might want to export the data to CSV first with a XML template handling IDs of instant messengers, then import into Yahoo Mail.