The Missing PrintMaster Address Book

Janice got frustrated tonight when her address book disappeared.

She had been using PrintMaster to add address book entries so she could print mailing labels, and the addresses reportedly disappeared. When I looked at it, PrintMaster couldn’t find an address book. Janice mentioned that we used it to print mailing labels a few months ago. Since PrintMaster stores its address book in an unspecified location, I went searching the file system for the address book, knowing that it had to be somewhere.

Since I’m a Linux and shell scripting regular, I resorted to comfortable tools: Cygwin bash and find. I didn’t find file names containing the word “address” in her home directory, so I searched my user’s home directory. Nothing. I searched c:\Users\Public and one I created, c:\Users\Shared. Still nothing.

So I searched the entire C: drive, and found C:\ProgramData\Broderbund Software\Print\PrintMaster\Books\ADDRESS.ABK

Interestingly, I couldn’t open it from Janice’s account — permission was denied. There were no permissions on the file. So I started my cygwin shell as Administrator, and then I could view it. I made a copy of the file and used cacls to give Janice access to the file:

cacls.exe JaniceAddress.ABK /e /g "Janice":f

At that point, PrintMaster was able to find and use the address book.

Now that I think about it, I could have run Explorer as Administrator, and the security tab of the file properties window would have been easier to use than cacls.