Organizational Tips: addresses

One Christmas when I was in middle school, I received a beautiful address book. It was white and light blue, with a design of seashells all over the cover. I loved it! This was back in the day when you could use teen magazines to sign up for pen pals – you know, before 50-year-old pedophiles would sign up, posing as preteen girls. But I digress. Anyway, I had three pen pals: Lindsey in Oregon, Amy Laura in England, and Edgars in Latvia. Also, in my never-ending quest to be the favorite grandchild on both sides of my family, I would write letters and send snapshot photos to my grandparents.

What was the point? Oh, yeah: the address book. Although beautiful, the address book presented two problems. First, no sooner had I updated it, inevitably someone would move or change their phone number. Second, once I started adding my friends’ addresses, I ran out of room almost immediately. Of course, this was back in the late 80s, so I just kept using white-out (gag!) and re-writing addresses. Eventually I gave up and got another address book. Then another one. And another one. And yet another one.

AND THEN… I discovered the joy of excel spreadsheets when I was 22. {insert a choir of angels singing}

Although arguably not as charming as a seashell address book, I could make changes as often as I like and add as many people as my heart desired. For example, my current address spreadsheet has 229 families on it. Yes, I know, I’m quite the celebrity! Actually, I just stalk people until they enter the witness protection program. But I digress yet again.

I highly recommend entering all your family/friends’ address and phone numbers on a spreadsheet. The columns I use (in order) are:

1. last name
2. first name(s)
3. children living at home, when applicable
4. street address
5. city
6. state
7. zip
8. primary phone #
9. secondary phone #

For friends living abroad, I use the street address column for the first line of their address, and the city column for the second line of their address.

Benefits of making an excel spreadsheet:

• you can make changes and additions easily and often, without using white-out or getting a new address book
• you aren’t ever limited by space, so you can add all the friends, family members, co-workers, and acquaintances as you could possibly want
• when someone pisses you off, the delete button offers a surprising level of satisfaction
• someone getting married and changing their last name no longer presents a problem, because moving them to a different page is as easy as clicking “sort”
• always in alphabetical order, without any brain power required
• two words: mail merge! {insert a choir of angels singing again} (addressing the envelopes for those year-end Christmas letters has never been easier!)
• you have the ability to sort, so you can locate all family members or all local friends quicker than you can say “smack that bootie”
• you can use pretty fonts
• you can run spell check
• you can print new copies whenever you want
• you can sell the list to spam companies for supplemental income

The list goes on and on, but I’ll stop there.

p.s. – No, Microsoft isn’t paying me for endorsing excel. I wish they were, but no. Any advice on how to make that happen?