Losing entries from address book

I needed a phone number last night...when I went into the Address Book, the contact and related page was gone. This is very scary as I have numbers for relatives in a foreign country, and other important information contained in the Address Book.
I started a new card, entered the info, saved the data, and closed the Address Book. When I went back it was gone AGAIN!
Please, I need a fix.

Is this something that happens everytime you try to add a new card or is it intermittent?
It sounds like your doing everything right, so it's a bit difficut to diagnosis.
The other thing I'd suggest is trying Address Book in another user account. Assuming that works properly, you might try going back to your account and use File>Export and create an Address Book Archive that will be a back up of the current contents of your address book.
(It's a good idea to make a periodic back up of your contacts anyway.)
Then you can delete your current contents and then reimport from a the Archive.
It's possible you current database is some how currpoted.
Matt

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Not displaying matching entries from address book

I used to be able to type a contact when sending a message and it automatically displayed a list of suggested contact names but now it is no longer doing that. I have not recently installed any new extensions or add ons and not sure why it has stopped from doing this. Can anyone please tell me what the problem may be?

Try restarting Thunderbird with add-ons disabled (Thunderbird Safe Mode). On the Help menu, click on "Restart with Add-ons Disabled". If Thunderbird works like normal, there is an Add-on or Theme interfering with normal operations. You will need to re-enable add-ons one at a time until you locate the offender.
It was an add-on that caused that last time for me.

Contact disappeared from iPhone but not deleted from Address Book on sync

FYI, I have an iPhone 3G running iOS 4.2 (the latest), and I have never so much as thought about MobileMe.
Until two days ago, I have had no reason to doubt that my iPhone's Contact list is the same as my MacBook's Address Book list. I now have no confidence that the same info. exists in both: I know for sure that at least one contact long present in both has disappeared from the iPhone, yet syncing all contacts neither returns it to the iPhone nor deletes it from Address Book! I need help troubleshooting this contact as well as verifying that there aren't other similar anomalies corrupting my data, hopefully without manually comparing all 685 entries...
Two days ago, a certain number, let's call it (310) 555-5555, popped up in my recents list as a missed call and in my visual voicemail. When I listened to the voicemail, I discovered that (310) 555-5555 was Jane Smith. I remembered entering Jane Smith several months ago, so I thought hmmm, does she have a second number? I tried to add (310) 555-5555 to an existing entry, only to find my iPhone had no entry for Jane Smith anymore at all! I did not delete her myself, and I'm not aware of any 3rd-party app that ought to have affected the entry. I haven't called Jane Smith or (310) 555-5555 in quite some time, so I have no idea how long the entry may have been missing. I searched the whole phone (left of the first home screen)
At the next opportunity, I looked in Address Book on my laptop, and indeed found the expected entry for Jane Smith, (310) 555-5555. I have no idea how she disappeared from my iPhone -- did I or some third-party program delete her? Or did it happen through some sync issue? -- but I naturally worried that when I next synced, the deletion would sync, too, and I would lose the Address Book entry, leaving me without Jane Smith's number at all.
Such an event would defeat the entire purpose of backing up my phone contacts to my computer; I just moved to iPhone this spring after being a Palm user since 1997, and the idea that iPhone might not be reliably syncing my contacts is frankly terrifying. I checked and saw that my Address Book listed 685 contacts to iPhone Contacts's 684, so I decided to risk a sync in hopes that maybe I had caused a one-off deletion. I wrote down Jane Smith (310) 555-5555 just in case and hit sync.
The results of the sync and my subsequent troubleshooting have seriously undermined my confidence in the fidelity of the sync process. The first time, nothing changed--I still had 684 iPhone, no Jane Smith, and 685 Address Book, including Jane Smith.
Thanks in advance for any assistance.
Message was edited by: Lindsey Worth

Before conecting your phone, open iTunes on your computer and go to Preferences, on the Devices tab check "Prevent...from syncing automatically". Now connect your phone and when it appears in iTunes on the left sidebar click on its name. Go to the Info tab and confirm than your have checked Sync Contacts with Address Book. Now further down on the Info tab under Advanced>Replace information on this iPhone check Contacts. Click Apply and sync your phone. This will replace the contacts on your phone with the contacts in Address Book. (When complete you can go back to iTunes preferences and uncheck "Prevent..." to re-establish automatic syncing if your prefer this.)

Why can't I add Birthdays in iCal unless they come from Address Book !

I don't get it. I have a Birthdays calendar that seems to only allow birthdays to be created from the Address Book. If I go to iCal, and select the Birthdays calendar and then try to double click on a date, I just get the message that reads; "Read Only Calendar. You can not change events or ToDo in a read only calendar". I can select any other calendar and add an Birthday "event" that repeats every year. But, Come On !!!! How lame is that!
Who knows, maybe this is a problem with Address Book not allowing multiple Birthdays per entry (for example one email address per family but there are 4 people in that family). I do not intend to create a separate Address book entry for my friend /family young children just so I can see their Birthday's in iCal. That would be ugly.
Does anyone have a solution. Is there any hope that Apple would even consider this type of fix?
Thanks in advance,
Brad.

Thanks for the suggestion Austin, however that would still not solve the problem where Address Book only allows 1 Birthday entry per address book entry. My brother, his wife and 2 children all share 1 email address for their household. So, I only have 1 entry in Address book. I used the "+" button in Address book to add the wife and kids, just like you can do for many of the items when editing an address book entry. That is Except Birthday!
Oh well, I have given up on address book except to store basic info. For the birthdays, I decided to just creats "events" in iCal itself that repeat every year. No sence over complicating things I guess.

How to delete duplicate entries in address book

Is there an easy way to delete duplicate entries in Address Book?

I have an iPhone where I create new contact details and a MB Air running OX X 10.7.3
In Address Book I see duplicate entries across the whole book. The other day I was traveling without my MB and needed to urgently reach someone who's number I knew was in my iPhone contact list for sure but searched and search and couldn't find it.
Turns out that when I had been going through the Adress Book on the MB Air trying to eliminate some of the duplicates I had chosed --without even knowing it or realzing it-- the card that I guess sync with my iPhone. It was gone. Sure enough, when I got back and looked it up on the MB Air it was still there not syncing to my iPhone.
I have used Address Book / Card / Look for Duplicates ...
I have also followed the Help suggesting and pressed Control / select to highlight two duplicate cards and even though the First / Last / Company / phone numbers / etc. are all the same I get the message: "The cards could not be merged because they came from different accounts."
I have checked with guys from the office who have the exact same problem with no idea how to solve the problem.
Is it that in order to use Address Book on both an iPhone and an OS X machine you've just got to be smarter, more sophisticated, more IT oriented?
Seems like a pretty easy thing not to be struggling with.
I should mention that I was a Mobile Me subscriber and now use iCloud which I'm sure has something to do with all of this.
But it seems pretty basic to me. If I have an Address Book it should synchronize between OX X and IOS.

View Duplicate Entries in Address Book

Does anyone know how you can view your duplicate entries in Address Book before you merge them?
Thank you!

books06,
Welcome to Apple Discussions.
It depends upon which version of Address Book you are using, and your definition of "view."
1. Address Book 3.1.1 Help
2. Address Book 4.0.3 Help: Combining duplicate cards and information
To find and merge duplicate cards:
1. Choose Card > "Look for Duplicate Entries."
2. Address Book tells you if it finds duplicate cards, cards containing duplicated information, or both.
3. Click Merge to merge duplicate cards and remove redundant information on cards.
When Address Book merges duplicate cards, it creates a single card for the contact containing all of the unique information from each merged card. Address Book uses the picture from the merged card appearing first in the list.
To merge selected cards only, Command-click to select the cards you want to combine and choose Card > Merge Selected Cards. Address Book creates a single card using the name and picture of the selected card appearing first in the list.;~)

How do I share a contact from Address Book via email?

I am trying to send email address details in a Mailing list from my Address Book to a colleague. I have tried going to Attachment option but doesn't include option to attach from Address Book. Also tried copying so that I can paste into the body of the email without success. How can I share these contact details please?
Thanks

What does your correspondent need or want?
One well established standard for exchanging contact information is the vCard which encapsulates many of the commonly used fields in a Contact entry.
If a vCard suits you and your correspondent, this add-on:
https://nic-nac-project.org/~kaosmos/morecols-en.html
has a nifty feature for sending vCards as attachments. Then your correspondent can probably just add it to his address book. If you copy out single details, like name, address, email address phone no, then the other person has to insert each one into his address book by hand.
If you open the Mailing List in your Address Book, you can probably drag each item out into the body of a new email message. But that's more work than necessary for you and for the recipient, who will need to add each one manually to his address book.
With this add-on, you should be able to open the Mailing List by selecting it in the Address Book, then use ctrl+a to select all, then right-click and select "Send as vCard"; it will open a new message with all the selected Contacts attached.
Lists in general don't have a standard presentation, so a List in one email client is only rarely useful in another. If you both use Thunderbird, you could use this add-on to export the List to a .tha or .thm file which another Thunderbird user could import.

Creating a drop down to add customer address from Address book in numbers 0

Hi fellow Mac people,
I have a numbers invoice created and want to be able to add my customers addresses from address book using a drop down menu or just have it retrieve the info from address book
Anyone know how to do this
Any help would be great
Thanks
Rob

You can drag an entry from the address book into a table in a Numbers document. Numbers does not have a way to do add contact information via a drop down menu. The table you drag the contact(s) into should have column headings for each item you want (name, address, phone, etc) as explained in the User's Manual.
What you could do is create a table for all of your customer contact information. Every customer would be in the table. You could use then one of the LOOKUP functions or a popup menu to chose a particular contact from the table and transfer it to where you want it (such as on an invoice or an estimate or whatever other tables you have in your document).

Mail and addresses from Address Book

When I type an e-mail address in the "To" field of a new message, Mail recovers the full name from Address Book and adds it to the e-mail address. Sometimes I don't want this to happen, instead I want to enter just the plain e-mail address. I know I can edit the address in the "To" field, but I have to enter some character(s) to override the default, otherwise if I just remove the name the system puts back the full name from Address Book. Is there a possibility to get just the e-mail address from Address Book but not the full name of that person? Sometimes I use nicknames, or mnemonic characters instead of real names and I don't want these to be seen by the recipient.

I like the idea of Mail retrieving the email addresses from Address Book, but what I don't like is that it also retrieves "Last" and"First" names, and that it does not allow me to remove them from the "To" field when composing the message. Imagine that I have an entry in my Address Book such as "JOHN (THE FAT) DOE", Or "MARY (THE BLOND) DOE". Obviously, I do not want the recipients to know that I call them "the fat John", or "the blond Mary". Or, that I am sending a message to several people, and for confidentiality reasons I do not want them to know the names of the others. In other words, I want to retrieve email addresses from Address Book but NOT the real name of that person, or at least have the possibility to remove Last and First Names from the "To" field and show only the email address.
Thanks, and regards.

Lion iCal with Google caldav unable to add invitees from address book

Dear Support,
I am using google calendar as my cal server (caldav).
I used to be able to add invitees using address book into the event in Snow. But in Lion, iCal rejecting drag and drop from address book to the event. The mouse turned into a stop sign.
This is a show stopper, is there work around ? Is there plan to fix this ?
Why are named got rejected ? This is a simple basic feature. Is there plan to fix this ?
Also in iCal, I cant seem to delete google calender event. I've seen several complaint also, is this fixed with a patch ?
Apple support, please help.

Hello ac9000 and welcome to the BlackBerry Support Community Forums.
If you were to create a contact in your BlackBerry, does it sync to your Mac Address Boook?
In your BlackBerry Address Book if you go to Menu>Options, under Contact lists do you have an email account listed? If so, if you click into it, does this list sync wirelessley to this email account?
As for your Calendar, if you open your iCal do you have any calendars listed?
If you create a new Calendar and make a test entry, does this new Calendar sync to your device? If you create a Calendar appointment on your BlackBerry, does it sync to your iCal?
-HMthePirate
Come follow your BlackBerry Technical Team on twitter! @BlackBerryHelp
Be sure to click Kudos! for those who have helped you.Click Solution? for posts that have solved your issue(s)!

Call from address book

Hi, everyone.
I am developing some bb application which needs to catch and handle the number user called. When I tried to make a international call with "011" in front of the country code and number from address book(I saved the thole sequence as an entry in address book), I found the number I actually called was without "011" and the call can't get through. But it works if I call by manually dialling or from call log. Could anyone tell me what is the difference with calling from address book? Why bb removed "011" in front? Any suggestion will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Hi, you need to setup the device phone number, go to menu, phone (pressing the green key), press menu again, options, smart dialing
If I help you with any inquire, thank you for click kudos in my post.
If your issue has been solved, please mark the post was solved.

Cannot print from Address Book! Print freezes and will not proceed.

I want to print an address list for Christmas cards. When I select the Group, select all and select Print I get the option box. I then select my printer and use the down arrow to open the dialog box that shows I am printing from Address Book and gives the different forms I can use (ie list, label, envelope) as well as the fields to include in the list. Once I have everything selected I click the Print radio button. All of the information under the Address Book options line disappears. Print remains highlighted and my printer Que never opens or appears. If I manually open the printer there is no print job showing. At this point the Address Book application is frozen. I cannot select cancel on the print dialog box (I can click it, but it does not highlight and it does not close the dialog box! In order to get out of this situation I have had to close Address Book. The quit option on the menu does work and Force Quit is unnecessary.
I actually spoke with AppleCare on this issue on Friday 05 Dec 2008. The tech I spoke with knew of no other such situations, but when I started checking on this discussion page I see a posting from REECO from clear back on 24 Sept 2008. His posting can be found at http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8161605&tstart=0
The technician had me do several things. One was to pull my Caches folder out of my system Library folder. He also had me remove some Address Book preference items. The end result of these actions was a Mac Pro that would not boot! (The failure followed an Address Book crash with a "KERPROTECTIONFAILURE" and the message that some QualityMedia plugin might have created the problem!)(I could find no such plug in either on my system or via Google search!) The tech had asked me to boot to safe mode by booting while holding down the shift key untill the spinning gear appeared. The machine never progressed to a successful boot! I ended up having to use a 2nd hard drive and physically place it in internal slot 1 on my Mac Pro proceeding to reinstall Tiger! The bad news is that this did NOT solve my printing problem.
If I am attempting to print from a new install with just the Apple address card and the Owner's card in Address book the print proceeds fine. Once I import my data I am back to the same print failure.
Some diagnostic steps I have tried. I have tried USB local printers and bonjour printers. I have used Epson and Canon printers. I have tried to print to a PDF. I have tried printing from another computer (12 inch PowerBook) with identical results!
At this point I am going to call AppleCare Monday morning and see if anyone there has any more suggestions. Any suggestions this forum has will be received gratefully!

I was having the same crash or "just not print" problem as seen in other posts. I was able to fix it however, by making changes in some of the address cards I was going to print. By editing the "parent", "child", "spouse" fields which will get added to the name line of the label, I was able to get labels to print (or pdf preview) without difficulty.
I did not try and determine exactly what the problem was, but basically did a data cleanup. Since I didn't know that those fields would print, I had previously included information beyond just a name in the fields, like birthdates and such, eg. "Jimmy - 12/1/05". After either removing the fields entirely where I didn't really need them, or just cleaning them down to names only, they printed just fine. I'd considered trying to disable the feature entirely but the data cleanup was not hard for a dozen or so names.

Add Attendees (name AND phone no.) from Address Book to iCal for iPhone use

Hello scripting gurus and newbs alike.
I've looked through the forums, but can't find a COMPLETE solution to what I believe should be a fairly straightforward problem. I'll start by asking the question as concisely as I can, then bring in more information about what I have tried, and learned, so far. I'll also outline my broad (mini) project aims at the end, in case anyone is interested.
* Q: How can I add attendees, from my Address Book, to an iCal event, so that **ALL** the attendee details are included?
Note: It is VITAL to me that attendees' phone number(s) are available through iCal, not just {display name, email, participation status}. This is because I want MobileMe to synch the event with my iPhone, so I can call attendees directly from iCal. (or at least have iCal open the attendee's Contacts record so I can call from there!)
WHY DO I THINK IT SHOULD BE POSSIBLE?
Manually, I can simply dbl-click on the event, click into the attendees field, start typing the attendee name, and hit enter. When I do this, it works. MobileMe synchs it to the iPhone, I open iCal, select the event, tap the attendee, and I'm calling.
WHAT I'VE TRIED USING APPLESCRIPT
When I try the following script, I've only managed to set Sheila's name/email/participation status. I can retrieve her phone number from Address Book using the above approach, but unsure how to make it stick in iCal * such that I am able to use it to call directly from iCal on the iPhone *
++++++++++++++++++++++
tell application "Address Book"
set anAttendee to name of (first person whose name contains "Sheila")
end tell
tell application "iCal"
set newEvent to make new event at end with properties ¬
{summary:"Meeting Info.", location:"ZIP", description:"More yak", start date:SD, end date:SD + 120 * minutes}
make new attendee at end of attendees of newEvent with properties {display name:anAttendee}
end tell
++++++++++++++++++++++
WHERE I'VE LOOKED FOR SIMILAR EXAMPLES
Thanks to Rob (et al) for providing script examples used to create the above, see here: http://macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?id=5692
I've also looked at the following article, which makes me think I somehow need to use the PERSON ID in the event attendee list. Unfortunately, I have only managed to retrieve the ID, but had no joy trying to set it.
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech … index.html
THE PROJECT
I'm a surveyor, and using dialog(s) to enter relevant info., I'm looking to streamline my preparation for surveys when I make each new appointment.
My mini-project presently enables me to print survey forms (based on a Pages template) with details relating to the specific property (address/contact name&no./appointment date&time etc.) It also uses the appointment date&time to create the appropriate event in iCal.
I'm also confident I can add the contact details, such as agent/owner name(s) and phone number(s) in Address Book.
IF I COULD ONLY ADD THESE AS ATTENDEE(S), AS IF ADDED MANUALLY, I WOULD ALSO BE ABLE TO PHONE THE PROPERTY OWNERS WITH A COURTEOUS REMINDER WHEN I'M ON THE WAY!!
Can anyone help me achieve this?
Here's hoping.
Phil (wiimixer)

Phil
Referencing the attendee in iCal will only directly record the properties you mention - because that's how it's designed to work and there's no way around the restriction unless iCal is changed.
You could set the phone number elsewhere in the iCal event - e.g. notes, location, ... - and that would probably allow you to call from iCal (I don't have an iPhone so I can't be sure), but I am not sure I see the advantage over using the link to iPhone's Address Book which is set up by adding an attendee to the event. This might be because I am being dense, so if this is the case please elaborate.
EDIT:
I have read your original post in more detail since I wrote the above. It seems to me that you are saying that when you add the person to the iCal event via AppleScript that you do not get the link to the iPhone's Address Book when you sync via MobileMe. You imply, however, that it does work when you type the name manually. Are these both correct statements?
Message was edited by: Bernard Harte

Dragging invitee to iCal from address book doesn't work

In Snow Leopard I would drag invitees to an event from Address Book and it would begin checking their availability. Now when I drag an invitee, the red bubble with the number of contacts I'm dragging over appears, but the invitees don't actually make it over.

In Snow Leopard I would drag invitees to an event from Address Book and it would begin checking their availability. Now when I drag an invitee, the red bubble with the number of contacts I'm dragging over appears, but the invitees don't actually make it over.

Sync between MacBookPro and iPhone 3G does not sync properly. Calendars duplicate events but worse is that only contacts from Address book from letter T onwards sync. Any contacts on iPhone which are not on Mac are lost during sync.

Sync between MacBookPro and iPhone 3G does not sync properly. Calendars duplicate events but worse is that only contacts from Address book from letter T onwards sync. Any contacts on iPhone which are not on Mac are lost during sync.
Solutions?

No, I never really found an easy solution. I believe it is an issue with some corruption in the iTunes database on the specific device. In my case, both my iPad and iPhone now show duplicate stream songs if viewed through iTunes on my Mac, but they show different songs. A couple years ago I had a similar issue on my iPhone, and Apple support suggested I back up the phone, completely reset it, and then restore it from the backup. It did work, so I imagine it would probably work for my current issues with the iPhone and iPad. But resetting and restoring an iPad or iPhone always makes me a little nervous that something will get lost. When I did reset/restore the iPhone, I do have to say, the restore process was 100% perfect and I did not lose any data at all even though Apple support said I might. If you try to go that route, I would suggest backing the device up both to a computer through iTunes, and to the iCloud so that you have a double backup.
None of this really resolves the issue with how the iTunes databases are becoming corrupted on the apple devices though, so it is very likely to happen again until they fix it. I have been unable to determine if there were any specific actions or conditions which caused the corruption to happen in the first place.
Might be worth another call to Apple support, or dropping in the local Apple store if you have one near by.

Losing entries from address book

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