How to print a hard copy of the Address Book on your Mac

Data loss is always a nightmare senario, but it’s one that will hopefully fade away as cloud computing hits the mainstream. Sometime soon we’ll all be able to sleep safely at night knowing that no matter what happens to our computers we’ll have copies of our data elsewhere ready to be restored at the press of a button. But sadly we’re not there yet, and whilst it’s sensible to keep multiple stores of your data in multiple places nothing really beats having a hard copy of your most important data. In this quick tutorial I’ll show you how you can actually use an inbuilt feature including in Mac OS X Lion to print a physically copy of all the data stored in your address book which will help you out endlessly if you ever happen to somehow delete all of your contacts and their details.

To start things off you’ll want to open your Address Book app, and select all of your contacts (use a shift click on the first and last names). Then on the top meny bar select File and Print (or ⌘ + P) to open the print menu.

Click show details to open the full options.

The first thing to change is the option under the style menu, I find that the best option for printing and keeping things organised and legible is the lists option, but feel free to experiment and view the preview window to see what it will look like on paper.

As long as you’ve got all your contacts selected you’ll see the first set of them in the preview on the left. Using the Attributes menu on the righthand side you can select exactly what infomation you want printed out, it’s worth making sure Phone Numbers and email address are selected, and if you want to save paper and ink untick the photos to avoid have thumbnails of every person’s face printed alongside their name.

Once you’ve selected all the information you want printed the rest of the legwork is just making sure you’ve got the regular printer settings right, like the size of the paper and the correct printer name. All you’ll need to do next is hit print and your Mac will start it’s work.

Just make sure you have enough ink and paper to carry out the task, it’s also worth pointing out that you can’t simply update this list, unless you count using a biro, so just make sure all your address are up to date and in order before you take the plunge and print out the whole lot!