Yes the custom fields tab has quite a lot of space on and for most users wanting to easily capture a few more bits of extra data it’s ideal. The custom fields are stored in a separate table for each application that supports them, so there’s no possibility of field naming conflicts causing any problems. However, regardless of how the database works, it’s bad practice to try and capture the same information in more than one field.
Without knowing more about what you’re actually trying to accomplish it’s hard to suggest things you should try to achieve your goals. But as you’ve suggested already, the eTemplate application will allow you to change the primary screens. But if you’re new to eGW then I cannot emphasise enough you should ideally do a bit more learning before you go in and bulldoze your way through a load of changes - or at the very least setup a duplicate of your present system and experiment on that before applying them to you production system. If your next reply is “help, after messing up eTemplate my entire live system has disappeared” you will only get “I told you so” replies 
To get in to eTemplate, make sure you’ve logged in as an administrative user and go to the Admin application. Under the “Admin” section there is a link to Applications. In there you will see eTemplate listed, go ahead and click on Edit. Make sure it’s Enabled and Save the page. If you look on your navbar now you should see (either on the top or in the drop-down box from the tiny arrow at very far-right hand side of it) a link to eTemplate.
When you’re in the application, in the textbox called Name just enter “addressbook” (sans quotes) and click the Read button. You should be presented with a list. I suggest you start with addressbook.edit (and the latest version of it). Click the edit icon for that particular template and you’ll find yourself looking at the relevant screen. You can double-click fields to open the properties for that field and start making changes. A complete guide to eTemplate is well beyond the scope of this mailing list and there are numerous documents around that can help.
If you want to make changes to the text then ideally you should do this is in the Translation Tools (click the menu on the left hand side of the eTemplate application). Find Addressbook and click Edit. The rest should be pretty self-explanatory.
Not that I’m trying to scare you (too much) but I cannot stress enough to read the docs though, small changes you make now have the potential to cause problems later on which you might not discover straight away. Learn, experiment, test.
Best of luck,
WLD
WLD,
Thanks for the post. I was hoping to add fields to the main tab, but I see
that there is quite a bit of room on the “custom” tab.
If I place a field that is actually in an other table, it would be duplicate
entry, so I would probably need to modify the name to become unique on that
table.
On a side note, how can I edit the address book creation panels? There a a
few typos, I’d like to reposition the layout for data entry, remove some
fields (I have no use for country or a few others) and add a few.
I read about something called eTemplate, but I cannot find anything on where
to get it, how to use it, etc. I am familiar with eclipse. Could this be
used?
Thanks again for the input!
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