Address Service Simplifies Adding Address Info to Documents

Originally downloaded March 27, 2006. The best OS X services are those that actually save you a few steps. This looks like one of them. When you highlight someone’s name in a document, AddressService will let you replace the name with selected information you’ve stored for that person in Address Book.

Update 2/19/07. Unfortunately, AddressService isn’t really all that useful. It turns out that you can only select part of the person’s name–that is, either the first name or last name, but not both–and if there are multiple hits in your Address Book for that name, all of them will be pasted when you invoke the service. I can imagine that for some people this really would save time, but frankly I find it easier to just launch Address Book and do a quick search. If you could search on whole names, I’d probably be a big fan, but as it is, I just can’t see the use of cleaning up dozens of entries for people named “Smith” or “Jackie” whenever I use this thing.

Oh, one last note… I’ve had this service installed on my system for 10 months now, and only when it came time to test it today (at last!) did I find a reason to use it. Obviously, I’m just em:not in the target user group for this one. But I completely agree with the author that AddressBook should provide such a service for itself!

Until then, here’s one Application Service I can move out of my ~/Library/Services folder for now.

Version as tested: N/A.