General
Save Layout on exit -- If you want the program to remember the layout
of sub-windows, leave this checked.
Remember category -- If checked, the program will remember the last
category you select. Next time when you run the program, the program
will list only contacts of the last selected category.
TAB stop at field names -- If unchecked, the tab key on an Edit
Contact window will not stop at the field names. Some users rarely
change field names but field values, they might prefer unchecking this
option.
Always preview before printing -- When printing contact info using
built-in print functions, you may preview before printing the content to
a printer.
Enable multi-relationship to a contact -- Open Contacts can manage
relationship info between contacts. If you want to maintain multiple
relationships between contact A and contact B, you may leave this option
checked.
Auto complete with some fields -- Many contacts might live in the
same city or the same state. To minimize repeated typing, you might want
to pick up historical values of some data fields like City and State. If
this option is checked and the respective predefined data fields are
marked with "Auto Complete", when you key-in data to a respective data
field, the program will show you the closest matches in a drop-down
list, so you can pick one.
Use ISO data format -- You might have ever run into a situation
feeling confused when reading a date like this 04/05/07, were not sure
about the date was written by an American or an European. Why not just
consistently use an unambiguous ISO format yyyy-MM-dd? If you will
exchange contact info with others, leaving this option checked will
improve accuracy of maintaining date info. Nevertheless, if you really
desire to use a date format, you may just uncheck this options, and set
the date format in the regional settings of Windows, then Open Contacts
will use that format anyway.
Birthday Field -- In the Search Birthday window, Open Contacts will
use this field name by default to search for birthday info. If you
use non-English version of Open Contacts, you might need to translate
this field name. In function "Export
to Birthday Reminder", this field name is used to find out the
birthdays of selected contacts. If you want to "export to anniversary
reminder", you make hack the value of this field as "Anniversary".
View
Enable demo link -- For first-time users, Open Contacts provide a
demo database of address book, with which you may get impressions of
features the program provides. The Demo link is shown in the main
window, and you may hide it if you think you don't need to learn through
the demo database anymore.
Show surname and given name of people -- To make it easy to input
name, Open Contacts provides a single edit box for inputting the full
name of a contact, and the program can analyze the name into surname,
given name and middle name. However, if you desire, you may show
separated edit boxes for inputting surname, given name and middle name
separately. Please refer to Edit
Contact Details for more details.
Sort by surname when listing people -- By default, the program will
sort people in the People List window by the first character of the full
names. You may check this option in order to list people by the first
character of the surnames.
Enable shortcuts to sections -- In the Edit Contact window, shortcuts
as links to sections will appear if there are sections hidden below the
bottom of the window. Though you may scroll down to view the lower
sections, if you check this option, you may click any of the shortcut
links to jump to any section.
Show Status Bar -- If checked, the main window will have a status bar
at the bottom showing hints. If you are familiar with the operations of
Open Contacts and want to save a bit space, you may remove the status
bar by unchecking this option.
Enable tray icon -- If checked, when minimize the program, the
program will present itself in the Windows tray rather than the task
bar.
Tab Position of Edit Windows -- In a Edit Contact window, there are
multiple tabs of panel presenting Details, Companies, Contacts and
Associated. The tab position is on the top by default. You may redefine
the tab orientation on the other direction.
Show counter in contact list -- In the Contact List windows, you may
display the number of contacts listed.
Hide contacts tab in Company window -- Though it
is optional to have the Contacts tab in the Edit Company window, it
generally does not sound very nice to define a relationship from a
company to people in an address book program oriented to people. If you
really desire to define a relationship from a company to people, you may
uncheck this option.
Quick search by contact name -- When checked, a small edit box will
appear on the top of the People List window and the Companies List
window. When you key-in a person name, the program will mach people with
2 matching patterns: with one character, list all people with the same
initial character; with multiple characters, list all people with the
same substring in name. For example, with "And", Andy and Sandy may come
out. With this option checked, it make sense to hide the Initials
windows.
Compact UI -- If checked, in the main section of Edit Contact window,
the labels will not be shown in order to save space for data.
Quick View Style Sheet -- Open Contacts uses XSL style sheet files to
render contact info in the Quick View window. The style sheet files are
located in the Templates directory under the user data directory. File "Default.xsl"
is associated with the Normal mode, and File "DefaultAdvanced.xsl" is
associated with the Advanced mode. With the advanced mode, navigating
between contacts and triggering actions are presented by hyper links.
Show Quick View always -- If checked, the Quick View window will be
shown at startup of the program.
Show Photo Viewer always -- If checked, the Photo Viewer will be
shown at startup of the program.
Field drop down count -- The
number defines how many visible items in the drop down list. If you
don't want to scroll up and down the list, you may want a larger number.
New Contact
Please refer to Predefined Sections
for more details.
Import/Export
HTML target of exporting -- When exporting selected contacts to HTML,
with File, the exported HTML of contact info will be saved into a file;
with the second option, the HTML will be save into a file then the
default browser will be launched to show the content; with the third
option, the HTML content will be displayed in Microsoft Internet
Explorer directly, without saving the content to file.
Multiple contacts in one vCard file -- If checked, when exporting
selected contacts to vCard, the vCard file will contain multiple vCard
records.
Database
Database location -- The database location is by default in the data
directory under the user data directory. That is, for example, if your
user data directory is "C:\Documents and Settings\Your Name\OCData\",
the default location of the database is "C:\Documents and Settings\Your
Name\OCData\Data\". If for some reasons you desired to have the other
location, you may press the button to define.
Default Files directory -- While you can associate files to a contact,
the default location of file names without absolute file paths is
defined here. For example, if your user data directory is
"C:\Documents and Settings\Your Name\OCData\", the default location of
the Default Files directory is "C:\Documents and Settings\Your Name\OCData\Files",
and file name "SomeArticle.doc" represents a file in this directory; file
name like "SubFolder\AnotherArticle.doc" indicate the file is stored in
"....\Files\SubFolder\". You may change the location by defining an
absolute path of a directory.
Database Alias Name -- Some users might prefer to have multiple
address books. It is handy to give each address book an alias name to
avoid confusion.
Run Scripts -- This button is for running SQL scripts distributed as
patch. This function is rarely used, only for critical database
upgrading.
Applications
Default Emailer -- Open Contacts support Email programs through MAPI,
Outlook COM and Windows Shell. Generally you should use the first option
except for Lotus Notes which required the forth option. If your Windows
default Email program is MS Outlook, option 1 and 2 have the same
effect. For more details, please refer to Email.
Phone Prefix for Telephony and Skype -- It might happen that you have
some phone numbers recorded without country code or area code, as you
may not record area code for phone numbers in your city. Likely many of
these numbers share the same country code and area code as the result
you relocate yourself to another city. Defining a phone prefix for these
legacy numbers will be handy to dial from your new town to the old town.
Enable Action Plug-in -- Along with built-in functions associated
with a predefined field, you as programmer may develop your own plugin
functions to associate with the field. Thus you will have
custom actions upon the predefined field.
Enable change log for synchronization -- Check this to make Open
Contacts maintain a change log to support synchronization with other
devices which have address book programs.
SyncML Client for Open
Contacts will be used to synchronize contact info with a SyncML
server.
Clean up change log -- From time to time, you may want to clean up
the change log to reduce the size of the database.
Summary Format -- The function "Export
to Birthday Reminder" uses this string to compose the summary of
each event. This field can not be empty, and the default value is "%s
Birthday Celebration (Born in %s)". The first "%s"
represents the name of a contact, and the second one represents the
birth year. You may omit the second one. If you want to remind yourself
about anniversary of each contact, you may hack the
Birthday file as "Anniversary", and change
the Summary Format.
Description Template -- The function "Export
to Birthday Reminder" may use an XSLT file to compose the
description of each event. This field can be empty if you don't want to
compose the description. The field value should be a valid XSLT file
located in WorkingDirectory\Templates". A sample XSLT file is "iCalendarDescription.xsl"
in this directory. So if you want to use this file, the field value
should be "iCalendarDescription.xsl". You need to have basic knowledge
of XML and know how to use text editor to modify this XSLT file.
Map Services
Please refer to Map Services for more
details.