Working with Contacts

LaunchBar provides convenient access to your contacts, allowing you to quickly create new email messages or to retrieve phone numbers, postal addresses and other contact details, just by entering a few characters of a person’s name.

Searching for contacts by name
Searching for contacts by company name or job title
Personal Contacts vs. Company Contacts
Preferred Email Address
Creating Email Messages
Accessing the first contact detail
Sending file attachments via email
Show in Google Maps

Searching for contacts by name

Contacts can be selected quickly by typing an abbreviation of the searched person’s name. It also works with abbreviations of the person’s reverse name, so you can search for Robert Miller as well as for Miller Robert by typing e.g. ROMI or MIRO.

If you’ve specified a person’s nickname in your contacts, you can search for this nickname as well. LaunchBar places the nickname between first and last name, so you can e.g. search for Robert “Bobby” Miller by entering ROMI as well as BOMI.

Searching for contacts by company name or job title

The “Company” and “Job Title” categories allow you to quickly retrieve groups of similar contacts.

LaunchBar automatically groups people working for the same company or people with the same profession. These categories are directly accessible via abbreviation search.

You need a plumber? Just enter PLUM to select the Plumbers category, then hit the right arrow key to display a list of all plumbers contained in your contacts.

You may also search for a particular company by sub-searching the Companies category, then press right arrow to retrieve all people working for that company.

Personal Contacts vs. Company Contacts

LaunchBar distinguishes between Personal Contacts, representing individual persons, and Company Contacts which represent companies.

A Company Contact can be specified in Contacts.app either by selecting the contact’s “Company” checkbox or by choosing “Card > This is a Company” from the menu.

LaunchBar automatically collects personal and company contacts in separate categories, so you can quickly search for a company or person by sub-searching the corresponding category.

Preferred Email Address

When LaunchBar indexes your contacts it considers a contact’s preferred email address. In the OS X Contacts.app the preferred email address is determined by the order of email addresses - the first address is considered to be preferred. In Entourage it’s defined using the “Make Default” command.

When browsing the details of a selected contact with the right arrow key, the preferred email address is always shown at the top of the details list.

Creating Email Messages

To create a new email message via LaunchBar do one of the following:

Select the recipient’s contact card in LaunchBar and press Shift-Return. This creates a message to the contact’s preferred email address.
If a contact has multiple email addresses and you wish to send a message to a different address than the preferred one, select the contact in LaunchBar, press right arrow, choose the desired address from the list and press Return.
You can create new email messages to an entire contact group. Just select and open the contact group in LaunchBar to create a new message to all group members.
Send a piece of text to LaunchBar via Instant Send, then select the recipient’s contact card and press Return.
Run LaunchBar’s “New Mail Message” AppleScript to open a new, empty message window. If you are using Entourage, use the “New Entourage Mail Message” script instead.
Select the “New Mail Message” script, then press Space to start typing a short message. Press Return to open a new message window with this message.

Accessing the first contact detail

Opening a contact item with Shift-Return opens the first of its details (either its preferred email address, phone number, screen name, postal address, etc.). To gain direct access to a person’s email address (without having to browse its details first) it’s therefore not necessarily required to enable the “Direct Access > Email Addresses” option. You just have to select the corresponding contact item and press Shift-Return in order to create a new email message. If no email address has been set for this contact, its phone number will be opened and so forth.

If you wish to open a contact’s first detail by default when pressing Return, go to the Actions pane of LaunchBar preferences and set the Default Action for opening contacts to "Open First Contact Detail". You can then use Command-Return to open the selected contact card in Contacts.app.

Sending file attachments via email

Files can be conveniently sent as an email attachment to a particular contact. Select the file, press Tab, select the contact (or one of its email addresses) and press Return.

Show in Google Maps

Select a contact card or a particular postal address and choose Show in Google Maps from the Action menu (or press Command-Control-Return) to search for this address in Google Maps.