Multiple address books and/or Editing multiple address book entries

Question

Two questions from a neophyte to Address Book:
1) Is there any way to make a "bulk change" to multiple entries in an address book (e.g. Add the text "Bob's friend" to the notes section of all the contacts in a selected group, or add the note "family" to a selected set of contacts?
Perhaps there is a way to use Automator for this? or AppleScript?
2) Is there a way to create multiple address books (short of creating multiple user accounts and logging in and out) to separate, for example business contacts from personal ones? Or perhaps is there a way to add a field to a template that allows one to categorize a contact as personal, business, school, retail, Sharon's friend, etc?
Please lend me your ideas!

Answer 1

Welcome to the discussions, Rangely.
1) Yes, certainly, Applescript is ideal for this. See below for a simple sample. You can see which features of AB are accessible by using Script Editor to open AB's dictionary.
2) Well, you could, but AB assumes its database is in ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook, so you could have several parallel AB folders and swap them around as needed - but you can't do it from inside AB. It is much simpler to use the feature that suits the job - groups of contacts. As well as simplicity this has the advantage that details of someone who is business, school and Sharon's friend need only be stored once, as a contact can be in multiple groups.
AK
click here to open this script in your editor<pre style="font-family: 'Monaco', 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; overflow:auto; color: #222; background: #DDD; padding: 0.2em; font-size: 10px; width:400px">--Skeleton AB Script
--AK Mar 2007
tell application "Address Book"
repeat with Who in every person of group "Cousins"
if note of Who exists then
set note of Who to "Bob's Friend"
end if
end repeat
end tell</pre>