Hi,
I have literally spent weeks getting all of my contacts in order, only to find that Address Book is good for getting information in, but terrible for getting it back out. I too found that Address Book allows for no flexibility in determining which fields will be used in an address. It also does not properly "formerly" address contacts.
I also ran into the problem of contacts being addressed as first, last, and related names. I have found that if you create a separate group for the contacts for whom you are creating envelopes or labels, the envelope will print differently.
For example, first create a group (i.e. Holiday Cards) in AB and put your desired contacts in it. Highlight it. Select File, Print and then select the Label tab. Instead of selecting "All", select the group for which you want to print envelopes or labels. The prefix, first, last, and suffix will then print for those records. If you select "All", as you mentioned, the address will read first, last, and related names.
Another way that I addressed the issue is by using the Job Title and Department fields to store formal addresses for personal entries, since I did not need to track this information for personal contacts. For example, Mary Smith, a good friend, who is married to Bill (spouse), who is also a physician, with 3 kids (child, child, child) would have the "Job Title" of Dr. and Mrs. William Smith and Family, and the "Department" is Mary and Bill and Family (or list kids names).
If I use AB to print the envelope, with Mary in a Group, the envelope will print "Mary Smith". If I use AB and print All records, the envelope will print Mary Smith and Bill, child, child, and child.
Or, you can then use Automator to export the information from the selected group into a text file, (Job Title and Department are 2 fields that can be exported along with other basic fields such as name, address, phone, emails), import the text file into Excel, and create a mail merge envelope in Word using the data from Excel. (I did run into a little trouble with the actual address information importing properly into Excel due to a hard return between the street address and the city, requiring me to manually tweek the text file.) But this, despite the work, enabled me to address the family properly and completely.
The solution that someone else recommended to change the related relationship to other will work, but it will compromise your data.
Also, using AB envelopes uses both the prefix and the suffix, which is often inappropriate. It would be better if Business contacts or any records marked "Company" used the first, last and suffix, and non "Company" contacts used the prefix, first and last. And for that matter, related names should have prefixes and suffixes and the logic should be such that spouses names would be properly put together and childrens names omitted from a formal address.
I thought that Address Book would work for me, but now I'm in an even worse place than I was last year when I was managing all of these addresses in an Excel spreadsheet!
Good luck and happy holidays!
iMac Mac OS X (10.4.3)
