[Brass]

Is there anyway to find all entries in the Address Book that do not belong to any group?

I often add entries and forget to put them into a group they should belong in, but there appears to be no easy way to find all entries that are not assigned to a group.

In fact, there appears to be no way at all to find which group(s) any one entry belongs to (apart from going through each group, looking for each entry).

Please prove me wrong!

[JKT]

You are right, there isn't any way to easily find contacts by (non-)group.

Try out iAddressX (an $8 menubar shareware app that puts your address book contacts in the menubar), it has an Ungrouped Contacts menu:

[chabig]

In fact, there appears to be no way at all to find which group(s) any one entry belongs to (apart from going through each group, looking for each entry)

I'm happy to prove you wrong here!

Choose ALL in the Group column. Then select an entry in the Name column. Just hold down the option key and Address Book will highlight all of the groups that contain that entry.

You can select the top name and (while holding option down) move down the list of names using the arrow key. Then it's really obvious when you run across a name that's not in any group.

Chris

[JKT]

Originally posted by chabig:
I'm happy to prove you wrong here!

Choose ALL in the Group column. Then select an entry in the Name column. Just hold down the option key and Address Book will highlight all of the groups that contain that entry.

You can select the top name and (while holding option down) move down the list of names using the arrow key. Then it's really obvious when you run across a name that's not in any group.

Chris

Well, thanks for proving me wrong! Hehehe, that's very nice but not exactly obvious.

[larkost]

Or you can use AppleScript:

Code:
tell application "Address Book"
	get the name of people where groups is equal to {}
end tell

There are a lot of ways to expand on this fairly simply, either with just AppleScript, or AppleScript Studio.

[Brass]

Thanks guys, for the info. That's great news. I hope that Apple makes it easier though, to find all non-grouped entries in one command (eg, a "smart group").