Destroy, Create, and Change: The Contact Editor

To delete a card, click on it once to select it, then press the Delete Card button. If you have multiple cards selected, you'll delete multiple cards.

Adding or changing cards is slightly more complicated. Any time you add information to the contact manager, whether it's an old card you're editing or a new card you're just adding to your address book, you'll use the contact editor. To change a card that already exists, just double click it to open the contact editor window with all the current information already filled in. If you want to create a new one, clicking the New Card button will open up that same window, but with empty fields instead of full ones. Either way, it's the same tool for quite similar tasks, and you'll find that it's pretty flexible and can store quite a lot more than you'd think would fit onto a file card.

The contact editor window has two tabs, General, for basic contact information, and Details, for a more specific description of the person. In addition, it contains a File menu, covered in the section called The Contact Editor Menus in Chapter 10, and a toolbar with three items: Save and Close, Print, and Delete. After that, however, it gets slightly more complicated, as you can see in Figure 3-2.

Figure 3-2. Evolution Contact Editor

The General tab contains no less than seven sections, each with an icon: a face, for name and company; a telephone for phone numbers; an envelope for email address; a globe for web page address; a house for postal address; a file folder for contacts, and a briefcase for categories. You can guess what sort of information belongs in fields like Job Title and Web page address, but there are several parts of the window that are a little more interesting.

Full Name

The Full Name field has two major features:

  • You can enter a name into the Full Name field, but you can also click the Full Name button to bring up a small dialog box with a few text boxes

    Title:

    Enter an honorific or select one from the menu.

    First:

    The person's first, or given, name.

    Middle:

    The middle name or initial, if any, goes here.

    Last:

    The last name (surname) belongs here.

    Suffix:

    Suffixes such as "Jr." or "III" can go here.

  • The Full Name field also interacts with the File As box to help you organize your contacts.

    To see how it works, type a name in the Full Name field: Eva Lucianne Tester. You'll notice that the File As field also fills up, but in reverse: Tester, Eva. You can pick Eva Tester from the drop-down, or type in your own, such as Lucianne Tester, Eva.

    Filing Suggestion: Don't enter something entirely different from the actual name, since you might forget that you've filed Eva's information under "F" for "Fictitious Helix Code Employee."

Multiple Values for Fields

If you click on the small arrow buttons next to the Primary Email field, you can also choose Email 2 and Email 3. Although the contact editor will only display one of those at any given time, Evolution will remember them all. The arrow buttons next to the telephone and postal address fields work in the same way.

The last item in the General tab is the Categories organization tool. That's really its own topic; for information on that, read the section called Organizing your Contact Manager.

The Details tab is, fortunately, much more simple: three sections, all of which are more or less obvious: the briefcase next to the details about the contact's professional life; the face next to the details about their personal life; the globe next to a big blank space you can use for anything and everything else you'd like to note about them. If you ever wanted to have that uncanny knack for remembering obscure details like the date of someone's anniversary (perhaps your own) this is the answer.