Clearing Last Import

I have just bought a MacBook Pro after over 20 years of using PC's and am going through a very steep learning curve. I have bought some software called O2M to help with the transfer of data from Outlook to Mail, Address Book and iCal.
The first problem I have hit is that on the PC I had my contacts categorised into folders, e.g. Friends, Family, Businesses, etc. In my wisdom I thought if I transferred one folder at a time I could just create one group at a time. This doesn't work because there is something called Last Import which every time I bring a new set of contacts over increases and basically puts all contacts I have transferred together. If I delete from Last Import the contact is deleted.

Is there any way of clearing Last Import so it only conatains the last set of contacts?

Regards

ElBeard0

I've never noticed this before because I usually just ignore the Last Import group, but it seems to behave the way you describe on both Mac's I tested with. I tried poking around in the various settings and even in the actual files where the address book and individual cards are stored and didn't find anything, so I turned to Google and found this short discussion at the Apple Support forums. It describes both a geeky and potentially dangerous fix and a more ingenious work around using a Smart Group that I think would work well for you. Here's the link:

Apple - Support - Discussions - Manually Reset AddressBook Last Import ...

The key setting in the smart group is to use the "is not member of" match condition and match against "any group".

On a different but related topic, while I was playing with Address Book in looking for a fix for this issue I discovered that if you highlight an individual card and press the "option" key on your keyboard Address Book will highlight all the groups that card is in, which I thought was pretty cool.

HTH - Good luck!

Thanks for that Dana, at the moment I am still grappling with Mac terminology I have only had the Mac a week. I have only just got what the idea of a group is, I will have to try and get my head around Smart Groups. I think I get the general idea and will get there eventually

Thanks for your help

ElBeardo

Importing Contacts and Using Last Import

I've struggled with the same issue - my solution - if you, like me, are using a .csv file to import, create an extra column in the .csv file.
Enter a random unique word/characters in this field for all the entries/contacts.
After the import, don't use 'last import' but just do a search in the address book for the unique word/characters. It should produce the list just imported. Select all and drop into the group of your choice.

Group = collection of names you manually drag over from the main list (a subset view of the main list, if you will)

Smart Group = collection of names added automatically when they meet the pre-definied criteria

(this also applies to "smart albums" in iPhoto, "smart playlists" in iTunes, smart folders, etc ...)