Using the ePave 5.1 address book

The user interface for the address book is quite cryptic, no doubt about it.

Suppose that today you are not doing any e-filing, but for some reason you would like to add a bunch of inventors to the address book. How would you do it? It's no easy trick, because when you launch ePave it immediately refuses to go further until you agree to create a new project or you say you want to work on some previously begun but unfiled project. None of these choices makes sense if you merely want to add some entries to the address book.

It turns out you can simply fake ePave into this. Tell ePave that you want to work on some previous project, even one that has already been e-filed. Go to "add common data elements". There on the right margin is the "<<Ab" button which you should click. Then the address book will be open and you can add and delete entries as you wish.

To add records to the address book:

1. Click on "Ab".
2. Uncheck "search"
3. Fill in the blanks.
4. Click "Add".
5. Repeat these steps until you have added the entries you want.

To put an entry from the address book into your submission package:

1. click on "Ab"
2. Check "search"
3. Find the entry you want.
4. Click "select."
5. Close the address book.

Readers will doubtless wonder if there is some way they might be able to edit the address book manually, or import data into it from other sources. The address book information is stored in a file called "addressbook.csv". If your ePave software is in the default path c:\program files\uspto\epave\, then the address book is in the path c:\program files\uspto\epave\def. This is a comma-separated-values file, meaning that each field is separated from the next with a comma. You can open this file in Notepad, for example. Each line in the file is a record, and each record is made up of a dozen or so fields separated by commas. An able programmer should be able to work out which fields are located where (they are unlabeled in the CSV file) and add records to the file without difficulty. It is probably also possible to use a spreadsheet application (e.g. Excel) to open the CSV file and edit it. Then when you are done editing it, you would direct your spreadsheet application to save t he file in CSV format.