On October 29, 2018, Contact Lenses offered ways to deduplicate, view, and sync contacts on the Mac. Today’s edition focuses on the basics of adding contacts as well as the advanced ability to import or update as a batch.

Once you get all your contacts in one place, you can easily sync them among your devices so you can correspond wherever you are.

Contacts Template

Before adding or editing contacts, I recommend reviewing the template for a new card. In Contacts preferences > Template, you’ll see the default fields shown when creating a new contact or editing an existing one, as shown above.

You can change the labels: For example, you might want the first phone field to be home, work, or iPhone instead of mobile. Or, if you want most of your new contacts to have a work email and not necessarily a personal email, you could change the default email label from home to work.

You can also add or remove fields: Choose a field to add from the Add Field popup menu, like if you consistently want Job Title present. To remove a field, click the ⊖ next to it.

And, you can choose to have more than one of a given field by default, such as both home and work addresses. Just click the ⊕ next to the field you want to duplicate. To indicate which label appears first, just label the fields in your preferred order.

Add Contacts From Mail

For people with whom you have corresponded by email, you can easily add their email address and other details to your contacts using Mail. There are a few approaches to accomplish this:

  1. Find a message to or from a given person. In the header, mouse over the person’s name. You’ll see a menu on the right side of the name. Either click the menu or right-click anywhere on the name. If the email address is not in your contacts already, you’ll see an Add to Contacts command. If it is in your contacts already, the command will read Show Contact Card.
  2. As you may recall from Mac Mondays: Previous Recipients, the Previous Recipients window shows email addresses you have sent email in the past. From here, you can see which ones are already in your contacts and add others if you wish.
  3. In an existing contact card, you may see some details in gray with an ⓘ to the right. Click the ⓘ to see where this info was referenced. Confirm that the detail is correctly associated with this contact. Choose to add it to the contact or ignore the reference.

Import Contacts From a List

If you have a lot of contacts you want to add at once or existing contact info to update, you can import all of them at once.

Create a framework for your import using a spreadsheet in an application like Apple Numbers, Microsoft Excel, or Google Sheets. Set up one column for each field. You can review the fields offered in the contact template to start.

Next, add your contacts to the spreadsheet with whatever details you have. You don’t have to fill every field but enter as much info as you can or want on file.

Make sure only one piece of info goes in each field. So, no single phone entry should have more than one phone number. You can pair the first names of a married couple if you consistently address them as a unit, but you might want to give them separate cards to record individual details like a personal email address or mobile phone number.

Once you’ve cleaned your data (verified it’s accurate and precise), export the spreadsheet as a CSV. Then use the Import command in Contacts:

  1. Choose the CSV you exported
  2. Verify that fields are mapped correctly; if the first row of your spreadsheet contains the field names, be sure to ignore the first card
  3. Address what to about duplicates (entries that match existing cards)

Besides the ability to import contacts, I find it way easier to manage them on the Mac than on iPhone. It’s convenient to be able to add one contact here and there on an iOS device but organizing them in groups and deleting contacts one at a time or en mass is much quicker in macOS.

What did you learn from today’s edition? Have you discovered any tricks when working with Contacts? If you need more help with the import process or need a spreadsheet template to help you get started, please reach out.