Show contacts not in a particular group in Address Book
Aug 22, '07 07:30:02AM
Contributed by: cdfmrl
This hint shows you how to find all contacts not in a particular Address Book group or Smart Group, and can be extended to arbitrary combinations of groups. It does not allow for live updating. (This older hint does something similar, but using AppleScript.)
The key is that once a selection of a number of contacts is made, Address Book maintains the selection even when you view another group. For example, say you have a group called Phone, synchronized to your cell phone, and you want to create a group of people not in the group, called not Phone. Here's what you'd do:
- Create an empty group named not Phone.
- Select all of your contacts and add them to this group.
- Click on the Phone group and select all of its contacts. (They may already be selected).
- Click on the not Phone group. You should notice that only the members of the Phone group are selected!
- Press Tab once to switch focus to the Name column.
- Hit Delete, then click the Remove from Group button in order to remove them from the group.
At this point, you have a group called not Phone which includes only the contacts who are not in the Phone group. It should be relatively easy to extend this to other combinations. For instance, to create a group of Miscellaneous contacts, create a new group, then remove anyone from the Friends, Family, and Work groups. Or, to make a list of your work friends, make a group called not Work and subtract them from the Friends group.
If you find this helpful, you should also read the Show all groups associated with a given contact hint, and er3l's comment below it regarding a "sticky" Option key.
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Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20070820131521779