A User's Guide to Evolution
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# Organizing your Contact Manager

Organizing your contact manager is a lot like organizing your mail. You can have folders and searches the same way you can with mail, but the contact manager does not allow vFolders. It does, however, allow each card to fall under several categories, and allow you to create your own categories. To learn about categories, read the section called Grouping with Categories.

## Groups of contacts

`Evolution` offers two ways for you to organize your cards. The first way is to use folders; this works the same way that mail folders do. For more flexibility, you can also mark contacts as members of different categories.

### Grouping with Folders

The simplest way to group address cards is to use folders. By default, cards start in the `Contacts` folder. If you've read the chapter called The Main Window: Evolution Basics then you already know that you can create a new folder by selecting File->New->Folder and that you can put new folders anywhere you like. Just like with mail, cards must be in a card folder, and no card can be in two places at once. If you want more flexibility, try the section called Grouping with Categories.

To put a card into a folder, just drag it there from the folder view. Remember that contact cards can only go in contact folders, just like mail can only go in mail folders, and calendars in calendar folders.

### Grouping with Categories

The other way to group cards is to mark them as belonging to different categories. The difference between folders and categories is that folders contain cards, but category membership is a property of each card. That means that you can mark a card as being in several categories or no category at all. For example, I put my friend Matthew's card in the "Business" category, because he works with me, the "Friends" category, because he's also my friend, and the "Frequent" category, because I call him all the time and can never remember his phone number.

To mark a card as belonging to a category, click the Categories button at the lower right. From the dialog box that appears, you can check as many or as few categories as you like.

Then, you can refer to all the cards in that category by: Waiting for Evolution to support the operation.

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