Saturday, June 30, 2012

Mac Address book not saving custom phone formats

I wanted to setup phone number formats in my Address Book but they wouldn't save.  Its not a permissions problem and there was some weird behaviour where I could add one row but not a second.

Like any good hacker / developer / software engineer I went under the hood and changed the preferences directly.

  • Close AddressBook
  • Open a terminal (I recommend iTerm if you get into the terminal often)
  • cd ~/Library/Preferences
  • Open com.apple.AddressBook.plist
  • You'll need XCode installed as this is where the .plist editor is now
  • Navigate to ABPhoneFormat-PhoneFormatter
  • Click the '+' to add a row (or right-click and choose 'Add Row')
  • Type the format.  For Australia I added the following:
  • 1. 04## ### ###
  • 2. 0# #### ####
  • Open AddressBook, go to Preferences.. and under Phone you should see your new formats