Using Contact Groups On a Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to create and use Groups in Contacts on your Mac.

MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about the Patreon Campaign. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts.

So in the Contacts App you can create Groups of contacts and use those to easily send email messages to everybody in that group. So first in the Contacts App you should see a list of names on the left and then whatever contact you have selected on the right. You may see another column here. If you don't go to View, Show Groups. Now you're going to see groups here on the left. If you are using more than one place to store contacts, like for instance iCloud and also on your Mac or maybe iCloud in Goggle, you'll also see those broken down into those different accounts. 

Now I don't have any groups here so I'm going to create one. I'm going to go to File, New Group. I could also use New Group from From Selection to take whatever I've got selected and start a new group with those items instantly in a group. But I'm going to create a new group from scratch. I'm going to call it Work Group A. Now you could see I've got Work Group A there and with it selected I see nothing. With all Contacts selected I see everything. So to put contacts in this group I'm simply going to Drag and Drop. So I"ll add one there. Add another here. Let's select this one and I'll Command Click to select two and I'll drag two into Work Group A. Now, if I look at Work Group A I see those four that I've added. So that's the first good use for Contacts right there. Instead of see All Contacts you can narrow it down to only seeing some. So if you have things broken up into work and personal, or family, friends and different clients per se, you can break it up into groups and then not have to search a big list of all contacts when you already know what group the person is in.

Now, while you're viewing a group you can select a name in here and you can hit the Delete key. Notice it will give you the option to delete the contact which isn't what you want to do. You want to Remove From Group. So that's how you get rid of contacts from a group. You can create more groups if you like. You can also create Smart Groups which automatically add in any contact cards that contain certain things or maybe the name or phone number or email, whatever contains for does not contain or is already a member of a certain group or not a member of a certain group. So you can use Smart Groups in a similar way to Smart Albums in Photos or Smart Folders in the Finder or Smart Albums in the Music App. 

So the Mail App is one of the primary places where you would use this. This is what it was built for. In the TO field instead of adding each person individually, like that and that, and building out the list each time you could simply type the name of the Group. So I'll start typing and you could see it auto-completes to that and you could see how it adds all four automatically. There's also a setting in Mail Preferences, under Composing, When sending to a group show all member addresses. If you uncheck that then when you add a Group it stays like that. Click on it and you can expand it to show all the names. 

Another handy place Groups shows up is whenever you want to add a contact to something, like here in Mail, notice you get this little mini-version of the Contacts App. I could go right to that group to add these names which could make it easier to find people to add. In a lot of cases you may not know who you want to email to and you don't want to email the whole group. But say something is work related and you want to quickly narrow your list from All Contacts instead to just the people you work with. Then you can pick from this list which people to add here. The same thing here in the Messages App. In the Messages App you can click here and you could see the Groups like that. But you can't just use the Group name here. You have to add people individually to the conversation. 

You can also use this in a few other places like, for instance, here in the Calendar App. If I go to Share a calendar I can share it with and I can type the Name of the Group and I can select the group and you can see it brings up all of the names in here. 

Back here in Contacts if you ever want to Rename the group just click on it to select and you click on it again if it doesn't come up right away and you can rename the group just like you can, say, a file or something else. You can also Control Click on this and export a vCard that contains all of these in here. You can also send an email right from here that includes all of those. You can see how it brings that up. If, with the Group selected, you hit the Delete key you can delete the group as well. 

Now you also have the ability to go to Edit, Edit Distribution List. Select the Group here and what this does is allows you to review all of the different people in the Group. Notice how one here has more than one email address. I can select the other email address for that person. So when I now send to Work Group A, Jane will get the email to this address rather than this address. 

Now Groups are really just for Mac users. But if you're storing your contacts in iCloud and you create a group that's in iCloud then you will actually see the group appear on your iPad and your iPhone. You can use it to send an email to that group. However, you cannot create groups, delete groups, edit or otherwise modify groups on those devices. You have to do that on the Mac. It's been this way since the very beginning. I'm not really sure why Apple doesn't want to add group modification to the other devices but it has always just been only on Mac. 

Now I should add that most people don't use Groups. Obviously if you have a specific use like a work group or you commonly send, you know, an email to your ten closest friends or family members and using a group makes that a bit easier then go ahead and use it. But a lot of people, myself included, never use groups. So if you haven't been using it up until now don't feel like you're missing out. Also, I should point out that if your plan is to send an email to a large number of people, more than say a dozen, then using groups and in fact sending from your own personal email account is probably not the way to go. If it's business oriented you want to get an email service that specializes in sending out newsletters and mass emails. Kind of like what I use for my MacMost Weekly Newsletter. Their servers are made for sending out mass emails whereas your personal account probably has a daily send limit and other kind of hidden limitations. It's not really meant for sending out mass emails. So keep that in mind. 

Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.