Your contacts in Desktop Minder are a folder, with one file for each person, in the vCard format that every phone and mail program can read. A basket—Family, Medical, whatever you like—is a folder inside it, and the baskets run along the top of the View as tabs, the way a mailbox's do. Open a contact and you get its sheet; drop a vCard file on the list and it's merged in. This page is how to do each thing a person does with a contact book, and how a contact vouches for your mail.

Where Contacts Live

The book is the Contacts folder in your PIM folder, beside Mail and Calendars. Each person is one file, Jenny Rizzo.vcf for instance, so you can copy, back up or sync the whole book as you would any folder, and a phone can read it. Open the Contacts folder from the PIM folder and it opens in the View on All, as the ordinary folder listing you already know from the Folder Documents page, with columns that belong to contacts. Its foot counts contacts, not items.

If you kept your contacts in the older single file, MyContacts.vcf, Desktop Minder moves them into the book when it starts: every card gets a file of its own, filed in the basket named by its first category, and the old file is put aside as MyContacts.vcf.moved, never deleted. It does this only when the book has nobody in it yet, so it never happens twice.

Baskets and Tabs

A contact lives in one basket, the folder its file is in. Along the top of the View is a tab for All, which lists every contact in the book with a Basket column showing where each is filed, and then a tab for each basket, with Other, the basket a contact goes to when nobody said, last. Click a tab and that basket is listed. A basket is a real folder, so it appears whether or not anyone is in it.

• Make a basket: right-click a tab (or the blank space after the tabs) and choose New Basket..., or use Document > New > Basket. Type a name and the View goes to it.
• Rename a basket: right-click its tab and choose Rename Basket.... Its contacts go with it.
• Delete a basket: right-click its tab and choose Delete Basket. It goes only when nobody is in it; otherwise the strip at the foot of the window says to move the contacts first. All and Everyone can't be baskets.

Names begin with a capital. A basket you name family becomes Family, as does a category, and a lower-case basket folder from an earlier version is renamed the next time the program starts. A name already in capitals, like ICE, is left alone.

Moving to Another Basket

Select one or more contacts, right-click, and choose Move To. It lists the baskets, ticks the one they are all in, and ends with New Basket... for filing them in one that doesn't exist yet. The basket's name is also one of the contact's categories, so Move To swaps the old basket's name for the new one there too, and the strip says how many moved.

The Listing

All the usual listing behavior is here, because it is the folder listing: the five styles (including Large and Extra Large icons, where a contact with a picture wears it), sorting by clicking a heading, choosing columns, and Back and Up. It starts in the Details style, sorted by File As (Family name, then Given), with these columns:

Your choices of sort, columns, style and widths are one set for All and every basket, kept in the book's own folder, so every tab looks alike. The extension, .vcf, isn't shown.

You can change a contact right in the listing. Rename (or F2) gives the contact another name, and the book writes the file under it; a second contact of the same name becomes Name (2), not a refusal. The Categories, Phone, Email and Organization cells are typed over the way you'd rename a file. Delete sends a contact to the Recycle Bin. File As follows from the name, and Basket is changed with Move To.

Making a Contact

Right-click the blank space in the listing and choose New Contact, or use Document > New > Contact. A blank sheet opens in the View, and the new contact is filed in the basket whose tab you're on (in Other, from All). Nothing is kept until something is typed, so opening a blank sheet and leaving leaves no empty card behind.

A message from a stranger can start a contact, too. In Unknown Senders, Add to Contacts... opens a card already filled in from the message. See Contacts, Strangers and Spam.

The Contact Sheet

Double-click a contact, or choose Open, and its sheet opens in the View. On the left are the fields: Name, Nickname, Organization, Title, Phones, Emails, Web, Address, Birthday and Note. On the right are Categories, the Picture, and Links to other contacts. A birthday is typed as 1970-02-15, or --02-15 if you don't know the year. Organization and Title offer every value already in the book, so a company is spelled the same way twice.

The sheet saves itself: what you type is written about a minute after the last change, and again when the sheet is put down—closed, left behind by a desktop switch, or the program closing. There is no OK button to press. (When a mail message starts a contact, the same sheet appears in a box with OK and Cancel, because that has to be settled before you go on.)

Several Contacts at Once

Select several contacts and choose Open N Contacts: they open together on one sheet. A field they agree on shows its value; one they differ on shows (various). Only a field you type into is written, and it's written to all of them, so a family can gain a surname, an address or a category in one go. A category only some have shows a half tick.

Links to Other Contacts

A contact can be linked to another: a child, a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a friend, a co-worker, a neighbor, kin, or just a contact. Under Links to other contacts, press Link to..., find the person in the list (it has a search box), choose what they are, and the dialog says in a sentence what it will do: Ann will be Bob's child, and Bob will be Ann's parent. The link is written at both ends, so each card shows the other. Unlink takes it away from both. Double-click a link in the list to open that contact. Links are made one contact at a time.

The Picture

Drop a picture on the picture box, or use Browse..., Paste or Web Address..., and Remove takes it out. A picture that is only a web address says so, and Bring In fetches it and puts it inside the card. See Bringing Pictures In.

Categories

A category is a label kept inside the card, and a contact can have as many as you like (the basket's name is always one of them). On the sheet, tick the ones that apply or type a new one and press Add. In the listing, select contacts and choose Categories on the right-click menu: it lists every category in the book, ticked for one all the chosen are in and half-ticked for one only some are, and New Category... makes another. Click a category to toggle it for all of them at once.

Bringing Pictures In

Contacts that came from Google carry their picture only as a web address, so the card has nothing to show until the picture is fetched. Right-click and choose Bring In N Pictures to fetch and store them inside the cards; with nothing selected, it means every one in the tab. A tab's own right-click menu has the same. It works four pictures at a time, shows progress on the strip, and Esc cancels. A picture that can't be had stays a link, and the strip names what was missed.

A picture that came from the web is looked at again, quietly, about once a month when its card is opened, and if the web has a different one you're asked which to keep. Refresh N Pictures asks for them now.

Searching

On the right of the bar is a Search box. Type, and after a moment the listing is narrowed, in All or in a basket, to the contacts holding those words anywhere in their name, nickname, organization, title, note, categories, email addresses, phone numbers, web addresses or addresses, ignoring capitals. Enter searches at once and Esc clears the search. If nobody matches, the listing says so.

Bringing Contacts In

From Google

A book with nobody in it says No contacts yet. You can drop vCard files here, and offers Open Google Contacts. The same is on the Document menu as Import from Google Contacts... at any time. It opens Google Contacts as a page in the View. Sign in there and choose Export; the vCard file that Google puts in your Downloads folder is noticed, merged into the book, and the strip says what happened: Brought in from contacts.vcf: 3 added, 40 already here. Desktop Minder waits about half an hour for that file. Then use Bring In Pictures, because Google's export carries pictures as addresses.

From a vCard File

Drop a vCard file, or several, from Explorer or from another folder on the listing, and the contacts in it are merged into the book. A person already there, matched by their identity or by name and a shared email or phone number, is brought up to date and not made twice: empty fields are filled, values it lists that weren't listed are added, categories it names are added, and nothing already there is taken away. The file itself is only read. Dropping anything that isn't a vCard file is refused with a word of explanation.

A VCard File Outside the Book

A vCard file that isn't a contact in the book—the export Google left in Downloads, or a file of several people someone mailed you—opens as a table of the contacts it holds, a list of its own, with tabs for its categories, editable in place. It's for looking; to keep them, drop the file on the book as above.

Exporting

Select contacts, right-click, and choose Export... (or Export N Contacts...). A Save box proposes the contact's name, or Contacts.vcf for several, and writes one vCard file, picture and all, that any phone or mail program will take.

A Contact Vouches for Mail

The book is also what your mail checks. Mail from an address on one of your cards goes to the Inbox; everyone else waits in Unknown Senders. Change the book anywhere—add a contact, fix an address—and a couple of seconds later the mail is sorted again, so whatever in Unknown Senders now has a voucher moves to the Inbox. The match is the whole address, exactly, ignoring capitals, and a card doesn't excuse a message from Spam Watch. The rules are on Contacts, Strangers and Spam.

Not Yet

• Google's contacts staying in step with the book. Today Google is a one-time export you bring in; nothing is sent back, and nothing is fetched on a schedule.
• Addresses filled in from your contacts as you type them into a message.
• A menu item for repairing a link that exists at only one end. The program can do it and the book is built to; nothing asks it to yet.
• Contacts on the phone. The files are standard vCard, so a phone can read a copy, but Desktop Minder doesn't talk to one.