Although Chandler does not formally support Contacts, we have heard of a number of users managing contact information in Chandler nonetheless, albeit in unconventional ways that stretch the boundaries of what traditional Address Books are used.

Benjamin Wilreker teaches cultural anthropology and archaeology in the Department of Human Behavior at the College of Southern Nevada in Las Vegas. He recently wrote into the Users List describing how he manages contacts in Chandler (examples in [ ], mine).

Note: We’re still not recommending Chandler as a replacement for your Address Book. It currently does not have the capability to keep track of email addresses, phone numbers and addresses for hundreds of people. However, it is interesting to see people making the most of the basic Chandler “Note” to integrate managing information about people with their todos and appointments.

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I have been using Chandler about 9 months now. I have a collection named “Contacts.” Each contact is a Chandler note titled after the name of the contact using a Last Name, First Name nomenclature. The contact list in the collection is sorted by title, thus creating an alpha-by-last-name list of contacts for easy browsing.

The details of the contact info (i.e. email address, phone number, birthdate) appear in the text field for each contact. Most of these contacts are cross-listed in other appropriate collections (i.e. research contacts are cross-listed with the appropriate research project collection.) Some personal contacts and friends only appear in “Contacts.”

Strengths of this approach:

• It is simple and context dependent. I always have the contacts I need for a particular project sitting in front of me. In practice I seldom use my global contacts list - I use the collection-associated contacts frequently.
• Because there are no defined fields, each record can be modified to suit the nature of the contact. As I skim the contacts I’m working with right now, I see one contact that “Reads Middle Egyptian” and another one that “Likes to get cards/gifts for groundhog day (feb 2)”
• If necessary, the contact can be used as a task, although in practice I tend to create new tasks instead.

Weaknesses of this approach:

• Chandler has no way to designate an item as a notice [as in “for reference” item] and not an action item [as in “to-do”]. I set my contacts as “later” and set the collection so that the items do not appear in my dashboard. In major projects with dozens of collaborators, this becomes an issue, because the contacts marked as “later” are indistinguishable from waiting tasks (also noted as “later”), and from non-contact, non-action items (i.e. a works cited list) that also appear as “later.”
• Because I am using the open text field, there is no prompting for particular types of information (i.e.”Children’s names”) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve forgotten to collect an important piece of information because there was no blank field to be filled in. Eventually I created a blank contact with a list of frequently used fields that I could copy and paste into new contacts when I created them.
• Chandler is not a main line email client. Because the notes field does not allow hypertext markup, I can’t create a mailto: command that would open my default email client, in this case Thunderbird, directly from my “contact.”
• Since I am using the notes field, obviously the data can only be entered by hand, and cannot be exported or imported to/from other applications using a commonly recognized format.