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Tips and Scenarios

Open Contacts had provided flexible ways of organizing contact info, and you can use your imagination to maximize its use for your daily life.

Print contacts

Even if you use computers daily with desktop PC, PDA and mobile phones etc, there are always scenarios in which you want to have contact info printed on papers.

It is always good to print out some phone numbers of family emergency contacts , and attach the paper to the dashboard or the door of refrigerator. These contacts could be local police outpost, hospital, GP, or handyman etc. You may setup a category in the organizational category tree or the individual category tree called “Emergency”, and assign some contacts with the category.

You may use the built-in print functions or a Web browser to print phone numbers only of selected contacts of the category.

Make extra copies of emergency contacts for holiday trip

When you go for holiday overseas, you might not want bring along your laptop, PDA and mobile phone. You might give yourself extra insurance policy by printing phone numbers of embassies, insurance companies, closed friends etc. In addition, in case you could possibly lost the paper during your trip, you may save the info to HTML and post it to your own web mail account.

It is of course, sometime somewhere somehow you lost the paper and could not access to the internet, then you of course need to remember at least one magic phone number, like 737263.

Birthday Management

You have friends, relatives and business partners to whom you will send birthday cards every year. Open Contacts had provided a window for searching birthdays of people. You may select search results to send Emails or export data to do further mail merges.

Rename a person or company

It is not rare that a company changes name, or a team undertakes more than one company names in the same premise. In these scenarios, sometimes you might want to keep the names but won't inputs duplicated info. The solution is to have multiple records for the same contact with different names, and link the records through relationships.

For example, a company "Super Good" is renamed to "Super Excellent". So, you change the name, and save the record, then create a new record "Super Good" with little detail, then create a Companies link to "Super Excellent" which has all details. Thus, when you check "Super Good", you may easily trace the details though the new identity of the company.