Video Transcript / Captions
Closed captioning for this video is available on YouTube: Company Contact Cards.
Now when working with contacts in the Contacts app most of the time when you add a new card you're going to enter a first and last name. This makes sense. But there are going to be times when there isn't a name associated with the contact. Think about it. You have contacts, like say your cable company or your power company. Something where it's a customer service line and there's no individual person that's associated with that contact. It's just a company.
So we can not enter a first and last name but instead a company name. Of course the actual name of your cable company would go there. You can click this company button right here which will actually put the company name at the top. It still leaves a spot for the first and last name. So say if you have a specific person you talk to. Maybe your insurance company, for instance, and there is an agent that you talk to but you don't really think of that person's name when you call them. You want to do it by the name of the company. So you can still put the first and last name there but it comes secondary. Just as the name of the company would come secondary during a normal contact.
The cool thing is, when you use it this way, that name of the company is now listed here on the left. It would be listed anyway if you left the first and last name blank but it makes a lot more sense in your list of contacts. Plus you can actually use Siri and actually use that name there. It syncs with your iPhone and everything like that over iCloud. So you can say, call insurance company, and it would actually use this contact. Or you can also use it when sending an email. You can start typing insurance company and it will fill in the email address there. It won't expect a name.
So it's very handy to do. I make sure in my real Contacts that I've got the customer service lines for all of the major services that I use around the house and things like that. So I've got, you know, my bank in there, my insurance companies, the power company, telecommunications, everything like that and it's all set to be a company contact rather than an individual's contact.
Without editing a contact, you can actually go to a card and you can go Mark This Person or Mark the Company, it's Command backslash, so you can change it there. You can also put an image for a company just as you could an individual. So, for instance, you can quickly go to the website for the company, say this way their website, and you can drag and drop their company logo in and it will actually put it there. So, you know, when you get a phone call from them or you're looking through your contacts on your iPhone or whatever, you can see an image there just as you could with a regular person.
Now when working with contacts in the Contacts app most of the time when you add a new card you're going to enter a first and last name. This makes sense. But there are going to be times when there isn't a name associated with the contact. Think about it. You have contacts, like say your cable company or your power company. Something where it's a customer service line and there's no individual person that's associated with that contact. It's just a company.
So we can not enter a first and last name but instead a company name. Of course the actual name of your cable company would go there. You can click this company button right here which will actually put the company name at the top. It still leaves a spot for the first and last name. So say if you have a specific person you talk to. Maybe your insurance company, for instance, and there is an agent that you talk to but you don't really think of that person's name when you call them. You want to do it by the name of the company. So you can still put the first and last name there but it comes secondary. Just as the name of the company would come secondary during a normal contact.
The cool thing is, when you use it this way, that name of the company is now listed here on the left. It would be listed anyway if you left the first and last name blank but it makes a lot more sense in your list of contacts. Plus you can actually use Siri and actually use that name there. It syncs with your iPhone and everything like that over iCloud. So you can say, call insurance company, and it would actually use this contact. Or you can also use it when sending an email. You can start typing insurance company and it will fill in the email address there. It won't expect a name.
So it's very handy to do. I make sure in my real Contacts that I've got the customer service lines for all of the major services that I use around the house and things like that. So I've got, you know, my bank in there, my insurance companies, the power company, telecommunications, everything like that and it's all set to be a company contact rather than an individual's contact.
Without editing a contact, you can actually go to a card and you can go Mark This Person or Mark the Company, it's Command backslash, so you can change it there. You can also put an image for a company just as you could an individual. So, for instance, you can quickly go to the website for the company, say this way their website, and you can drag and drop their company logo in and it will actually put it there. So, you know, when you get a phone call from them or you're looking through your contacts on your iPhone or whatever, you can see an image there just as you could with a regular person.
It is useful to keep information in the Notes field but I worry that when apps ask for permission to access my Contacts they access the whole database. If this is the case what alternatives are there?
I would say that if you don’t trust an app to have access to your contacts notes, then you shouldn’t trust it to have on your machine at all.
The only alternative is to simply not keep any sensitive information in your Contacts notes. Plenty of better places to put sensitive information anyway, like in a 1Password encrypted database.
This is a very good tip. Can this be done on the IOS Contact app as well? Doesn’t look like it but I figured I would ask :-)
Erick: There’s no switch, but if you create a new contact and simply enter a company name and no first and last name, it assumes it is a company.