A User's Guide to Evolution
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# The Evolution Contact Manager

> The `Evolution` contact manager can handle all of the functions of an address book, phone book, or Rolodex. Of course, it's a lot easier to update `Evolution` than it is to change an actual paper book. `Evolution` also allows easy synchronization with hand-held and remote devices. Since `Evolution` supports most major network protocols, including LDAP, it can fit into almost any existing network.

> Another advantage of the `Evolution` address book is its integration with the rest of the application. That means that when you look for someone's address, you can also see a history of appointments with that person. Or, you can get an e-mail with contact information in it and create a new address card on the spot. In addition, searches and folders and all work in the same way they do in the other components, so you don't have to learn another system for similar tasks.

> This chapter will cover using the `Evolution` contact manager to organize any amount of contact information, share addresses over a network, and several ways to save time with everyday tasks. To learn about configuring the contact manager, see the section called Managing the Contact Manager in the chapter called Advanced Configuration.

# Getting Started With the Contact Manager

To open up your address book, click on Contacts in the shortcut bar, or select one of your contacts folders from the folder bar. Figure 1 shows the Contact Manager in all its organizational glory. By default, the contact manager shows all your cards in alphabetical order, in a minicard format. You can select other views from the View menu, and adjust the width of the columns by clicking and dragging the grey column dividers.

Figure 1. Evolution Contact Manager

The toolbar for the address book is quite simple:

- Press New for a new contact.

- Find brings up an in-depth search window.

- Press Print to print one or more cards.

- Delete deletes a selected card.

- View All Displays all the address information in the folder. Use this button to refresh the display for a network folder, or to switch from viewing the results of a search and see the whole contents.

- Stop Stop loading contact data from the network. This button is only relevant if you are looking at contact information on a network.

The rest of the contact manager is taken up by the display of your contact information. You can view that display as a table or as a list of cards— switch views in the View menu — and move through them alphabetically with the buttons and the scrollbar at the right of the window. Of course, if you have more than a few people listed, you'll want some way of finding them more quickly, which is why there's a search feature.

## Searching for Contacts

Between `Delete` and `View All` is `Quick Search`. To use it, just type in one or more words you're looking for and hit Enter. `Evolution` will search through the contents of every displayed card to find one that matches. That means that you can refine searches by doing several in succession.

If there are no matches, the card display will be blank. When you'd like to see all the cards again, press `Show All`.

Example 1. Refining a Quick Search

Tom comes back from lunch and finds a note on his keyboard: "Curtis in sales called for you, but he didn't leave a number, and I forgot to write down the name of the company he works for. He said it was important, though." Tom is not at all annoyed.

He opens his contacts folder, and runs a quick search for "Curtis;" there are eighteen different people with that name in the file. He then enters "Sales," and `Evolution` narrows it down to the right Curtis. He only becomes annoyed when he discovers that the call was not actually important.

If you prefer to perform a more complex search, press Find or choose Tools->Search for Contact. This will open the in-depth search window, which lets you use multiple search criteria in the same way that email filters and vFolders do..

Click Add Criterion to increase the number of criteria you'd like to use in the search, and Remove Criterion to remove one from the bottom of the list. Your criteria may be a searchs within the `Name` or `Email` fields; alternately you can choose to search through all the fields with a regular expression. Then, you can select all the familiar requirements like `Begins With` and `Does Not Contain`, decide whether to match `All` or `Any` of your criteria, and press Search to set it all off.

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