Search option does not work in address book

Question

The search field (upper right corner of window) does not work in address book (version 4.0.5) of my friend's Power Book. I eliminated the possibility of a corrupt plist (preference) file by dragging them to the desktop and restarting but it still didn't help. Any other ideas?
Meg

Answer 1

If searching in Spotlight works, I don’t know what could be the problem. You may try this:
1. Open Address Book.
2. As an extra safety measure, do File > Back up Address Book and save the backup wherever you wish.
3. Go to Address Book > Preferences > vCard, set the vCard Format to 3.0 and check Export notes in vCards. Close the Preferences window when done.
4. Select the All group in the main Address Book window and do File > Export Group vCard (the command should read “Export Group vCard”, not just “Export vCard”).
5. Quit Address Book, Mail, and any other applications that might use Address Book for something. Or just quit all applications to be on the safe side.
6. In the Finder, go to ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/ and trash any ABPerson.skIndex files you may see there. Open Address Book and check whether the problem is fixed.
7. If the problem persists, quit Address Book again, in the Finder go to ~/Library/Application Support/, and move the entire AddressBook folder out of there, e.g. to the Desktop (to be deleted after fixing the problem and making sure you don’t miss anything).
8. Open Address Book and try doing File > Revert to Address Book Backup to restore the backup you made in step 2. If the problem persists, repeat step 7 and this time try doing File > Import > vCards to import the cards exported in step 4.
Note: For those not familiarized with the ~/ notation, it refers to the user’s home folder. That is, ~/Library is the Library folder within the user’s home folder, i.e. /Users/username/Library.