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Every Christmastime, I have to relearn how to make the Mac OS X Address Book behave. A couple years ago, Sarah and I started using my address book (which is entered in our iMac’s Address Book application) to store all our Christmas letter addresses. Well, as it turns out, if you have two separate entries for each member of a couple (say, John Doe and Jane Doe), if you were to print either one of these, the other’s spouse won’t show up on an envelope.
Forget that there is a special field seemingly for this purpose called, fittingly, “spouse”. Apple, in all their wisdom, apparently disabled the special printing feature which would allow you to print the spouse’s name along with the contact’s name on envelopes.
After much reading on the Apple user forums, the good tech nerds there pointed me toward a solution. One needs to create a new plist file and add it to the Address Book.
Instructions
| 1 | Save the above file to: /Applications/Address Book.app/Contents/Resources/ |
| 2 | Prep your contacts so that the Spouse – Name entry is the full name. For instance, for a contact named John Doe, the Spouse field should read “Jane Doe” and then the printed label for John will read “John and Jane Doe” |
Update (12/15/2013)
A reader rightly noted that the above instructions don’t quite work for OS 10.9. Note that the genies at Apple renamed Address Book.app to Contacts.app. Otherwise, the exact same steps above still work.
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