Does anyone else find it a little annoying, the way Groups work in your Address Book? Hypothetical situation: You open up Address Book and have 150 entries. 50 are work-related, 50 are friends and 50 are family. It would be nice to only see 3 icons representing the groups and you go into the group "folder" and select individual entries from there. Instead, you create a group, but, it's just thrown into the soup of 150 unsorted Address Book entries.

I have 750 entries and have never seen the benefit of going thru to separate into groups. I know I can search in either Outlook on on my BB.

Hey, I suggest you use "category" setting up this functionality, instead of groups. Groups is for things like mass emails; categories is for this tree-view style hierarchical view of your contacts.

To assign a category or categories to any contact, edit the contact, scroll down past the addresses, position in the category field. Enter-enter, then check the categories you want for this contact.

To edit the category list, perform the above to get into the list of categories, then use your edit key to add-delete categories for your contacts.

Once you have these set up, whenever you open your Address Book, hit your edit key & select the filters you want to view.

I use this feature extensively. Many of my contacts are assigned to more than one category, so I get pretty boffo access to my contacts.

Now all I need is a desktop Address Book manager that supports cats as well...

That is a great idea, using the Categories. I'm almost ashamed to say that I never once thought of that! LOL Thank you!

Chris

I'm newly converted from a Palm to my new 8830 and that is one of my issues with it. Thanks for the info, I'll try that. Whatta great site this is for info. I also wish there was a desktop manager (like I had with the Palm) that would integrate contacts, calender, etc.

I don't "almost wish" there was a desktop manager, I'm seriously needing one. If the new Palm has that plus decent hardware, there's a chance I'll switch, I really miss the old Palm desktop manager. My Curve is pretty terrific except for this serious void.

A lot of Palm coverts express that sentiment. You really just have to use Outlook. The on good thing about it is that everything is designed to sync with Outlook these days which is good for data transportability should you switch devices in the future.

The disadvantage is, of course, that you have to use Outlook for email/contacts/tasks. Be nice if any open-source clients had decent support for email/contacts/tasks synching with the BB.

Yeah...well...Outlook...um, no, not that desperate. Well wait, I have a question, then I might.

I do have a limited desktop address manager, "Blackberry Italia", that works via the IPD backup...not bad, except it doesn't support all fields of the address book (most notably it nukes "categories").

Hey you know what? If Outlook supports "categories" I could be very tempted. Anyone know about this?

Yes, You can change your Contacts List in Outlook (Address Book in BB) to sort by CATEGORY, COMPANY, LOCATION, PHONE NUMBER (numerically LOL) - all sorts of sorting schemes!

Chris