Contacts is one of the Mac’s core applications for organizing and preparing to communicate. It’s been part of the Mac since 2001 (originally introduced as Address Book) and remained largely unchanged. Don’t let that concern you, though, as Contacts has been fairly well-designed and effective throughout its decades of service.

While Contacts lacks some functionality that could make it an extraordinary app, it serves well the basics of storing, organizing, and syncing contact information for people and business.

Creation

In the beginning… A Rolodex® has cards. Often, these cards have a template. That is, lines and labels direct you where you write a name, address, or phone number.

At its foundation, Contacts reflects this metaphor. When you create a new contact card, the card is not entirely blank. Although it doesn’t contain any person details yet, it shows a template for some of these informational bits.

The only required fields in any card are First Name, Last Name, Company, and Note. In the Template section of Contacts’ settings window, you can specify what other fields appear by default in a new card.

These might include address, phone number, and email address, with specific labels on each. You can also add other details like solar or lunar birthday, website, social profiles, and more.

Outside of specifying fields in the template, you can add any available field to a given card. Either choose Card > Add Field and select the field you want, or click the ＋ and choose under Add Field to Card. You can also customize the label next to a field, such as to make one email “home” and one “work.”

To edit a card generally, click Edit in the bottom right or choose Edit > Edit Card (Command+L). To save the changes, click Done, choose Edit Card again, or Save in the normal fashion.

Sorting

Contacts offers a few simple methods to display and sort the people and companies listed in your digital address book so you can browse through them easily. In its General settings, you can choose whether to display first names before or after last names, sort by first or last name, and decide how contact names appear in other applications like Mail.

Organization & Distribution

To group cards together, Contacts offers Lists (formerly Groups). You can create a list and drag one or more contacts at a time into it. This can enable easier distribution by email or snail mail because you can easily print envelopes or mailing labels just for the members of a particular list, or send just those members an email message.

Contacts also supports Smart Lists wherein you can group contacts dynamically based on search criteria. For example, if you were going to email a specific group of folks, you might want to verify that you have an email address for all of them. You could create a smart list to show cards that are members of a selected list and whose Email is not set.

To see which list(s) contain a selected contact, hold the Option key and notice lists on the sidebar whose names turn blue.

Additionally, there are Distribution Lists. When sending email to grouped contacts, Mail will only send to one email address for each recipient in a group. For those with more than one address set on their card, you have the opportunity to choose.

To do so, click Edit > Edit Distribution List. Then, pick any list. Finally, next to any contact with more than one email address, you can click the one you want Mail to use.

I just read the fine print for the first time and discovered that this window also supports phone numbers and mailing addresses. This enables contact lists to also work for other communication channels, like text message and phone call, as well as for printing envelopes and mailing labels. Click the Email column header to toggle among these. Then, choose the preferred contact detail as before.

Relationships

Although rudimentary, Contacts is a relational database. Part of this is present in that you can specify a relationship between contacts. In addition to grouping them in lists, you can identify “related names.”

When you add a Related Name field to a contact, you specify the type of relationship and type the name of the person related to you in this way. Provided relationship labels are familial or professional, but you can specify any custom label you want.

This can go awry if you have multiple contacts with the same name. For example, I have three contacts who have the same first–last name combination as each other. To differentiate them I’ve added a middle name for two. Alternatively, you can specify a related name on iPhone or iPad and select the precise card for each relationship.

For a tiny application, Contacts provides a ton of essential functionality. Plus, it operates as a background service so you can easily add recipients to email and text messages, specify invitees on calendar events, find a contact’s address on a map, and more in a variety of other applications. Learn more…