I spend very little time managing my contacts, but I know that the Contacts app on a Mac is more efficient in most respects than the same app on iPhone or iPad. It’s easy to organize contacts in groups, merge duplicates at will, delete contacts I no longer need, and even make smart groups based on criteria like whether they have a mailing address.

However, it’s been ages since I considered using Contacts to print mailing labels and I definitely never thought to use it to print envelopes. Just select one or more contacts, or a whole group/list, and issue the Print command, and these options are suddenly available!

Contact Lists

In the Print dialog, choose Lists from the Style popup menu. (If you don’t see the Style menu, click Show Details at the bottom of the dialog.)

Then, select the Attributes (fields) you want to include in a formatted list.

Apart from choosing info to display, you cannot change the layout of the list, except selecting Portrait or Landscape. Contacts will always put the picture, name, nickname, job title, department, and company on the left. Email, web, and physical addresses; social profiles; birthday; notes; and relatives will appear in the middle. Phone numbers show up on the right.

You can also export a contact list to PDF (File > Export to PDF…). Oddly, this only displays all available details in portrait orientation and offers no ability to customize, which can make for a cluttered list. However, you can achieve a custom selection of attributes and orientation if you save as a PDF from the Print dialog.

(Did you know you can make just about anything into a PDF? In the Print dialog, click the PDF popup menu in the bottom left and choose Save as PDF inside.)

Mailing Labels

In the Print dialog, choose Mailing Labels from the Style popup menu. (If you don’t see the Style menu, click Show Details at the bottom of the dialog.)

In the Layout section, you can either specify a label layout from among the multitudes of Avery and DYMO choices or design your own.

In the Label section, you get to select which addresses to include. Did you know you can label different addresses as home, work, etc.?

You can also decide whether to print in alphabetical or postal code order, choose to include a company name and/or country or region, specify the typeface and color of the text, and optionally add an image. However, the image cannot be the icon set on each contact record itself.

Envelopes

In the Print dialog, choose Envelopes from the Style popup menu. (If you don’t see the Style menu, click Show Details at the bottom of the dialog.)

In the Layout section, you can specify an envelope size and the location of sender and recipient from a few dozen presets or with custom measurements.

The Label section provides roughly the same choices as that of Mailing Labels above with the addition of what to use as the return address.

Finally, an Orientation section offers portrait and landscape options.

If you’re in the habit of printing envelopes using a template in a word processor or using a mail merge between a spreadsheet and a word processing document to create mailing labels, you may want to consider the efficiency of using Contacts for the same purpose.