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TIPS AND TECHNIQUES
Using custom fields to assign multiple categories to Address Book entries
By Jake Jacobs
The Palm Address Book provides up to fifteen categories in which to place each entry. My personal list includes these categories: Business, Entertainment, Medical, Neighbors, Personal, Relatives, Restaurants, and Travel. Selecting a category is a very handy way to limit the size of the list when looking for an entry. For example if you select Medical, you get a list of physicians, dentists, hospitals, physical therapists, and so on. There are two problems with the categories feature. First, you are limited to only fifteen categories, but you may want more than fifteen. Second-and a more serious limitation-is that for each Address Book entry, you must decide on one--and only one--category. Both of these limitations disappear with the technique described in this article.
Why would you want more than one category for each entry? Well, let's say you have a neighbor who is a physician and who is also a member of your tennis club. Do you enter him in the Neighbors category, the Medical category, or the Tennis club category? You have to choose just one and let it go at that. You can place him in the Tennis club category, but when you want a listing of your neighbors to invite to your weekend block party, you might overlook him. What if you want a list of doctors in an emergency? Your doctor friend won't show up in the Medical category because you placed him in the Tennis club category.
If you want to find all your physician entries, you can use the Find feature to look for the string "md" and quickly get a list of any entry with md or MD in it. That works fine unless you live in or near the state of Maryland, or have lots of friends there. The abbreviation for Maryland is… yep, MD. You can see the problem. In general, your search might turn up extraneous entries. Let's say you were looking for a bus company, did a search on "bus," and got every listing with a word that started with "bus" in any field including "business," "Dave & Busters," and your friend named "George Bush."
Create a Custom Field
Here's a way to eliminate both limitations. You have the ability to create up to four Custom Fields in the Address Book application. Create a Custom Field in the Address Book called Associations.
To do this, choose Options->Rename Custom Fields from the Address Book menu, and you'll see four lines for you to use to create up to four Custom Field names, as shown in Figure A.
FIGURE A
You can create up to four Custom Fields.
Pick one of the four lines and call it Associations. This will be the field you'll use to assign multiple associations for each Address Book entry. It will show up on the Address Edit screen as shown in Figure B.
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