Using Lists in Contacts on Mac, iPhone and iPad

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's take a look at using Lists in the Contacts App on your Mac, iPhone, and iPad. 

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So with macOS Ventura and iOS 16 there have been some changes to the Contacts App. First, if you use Groups before in Contacts on your Mac you may have already noticed that Groups are now called Lists. Those Lists can be seen on the iPhone and iPad just as before. But a big change is that now you can manage those groups, creating new ones, adding and removing people from those Lists right on your iPhone and iPad. You don't have to do it on your Mac and have it sync to those devices. 

So let's launch the Contacts App here. On the left you should see here your account and any Lists you've created and then for whatever you have selected a list of all the names and then on the right you see whatever the contact is that you have selected. If you don't see all these columns go to the View Menu and here's where you could Hide and Show Lists. Also note that if the window is too small you won't be able to see those Lists there either. 

Now before we go any further I want to note that you can use multiple contacts services in the Contacts App. But when you do things get complex really fast. If you look in Contacts under Settings, that is Settings NOT accounts, then you go to Accounts in here you'll see all the different accounts you've got and for each one you can enable this account. If you've got more than one enabled you're going to see multiple accounts here on the left and things are going to get complex. You may see duplicate contacts because they're in both services and  when you create a new contact it could be confusing which service you're creating the contact in. You could be creating it, for instance, in Goggle or Yahoo instead of in iCloud. So unless you're ready to manage all the extra complexity, just have one account enabled, probably your iCloud Account and use just that. 

Now you could see here I already have one List created. One called Team. I have three contacts in it. You're always going to see All Contacts here. All Contacts is simply not viewing any group at all. You're just looking at every contact you have in that account, in this case iCloud. You just see the contacts in each List by selecting the List there. Now to create a new List you can go to File and use New List or New List From Selection. New List From Selection may be the quickest way to create a List. I'm holding down the Command Key so I can select noncontiguous contacts here, like this. So I have four selected. I can do New List From Selection and I would have a new List with those four in it. But you could also just choose New List to create an empty List. It gives it a default name there and you could click in there and then give it a name. I'll just call this Test. There's nothing in it. So to add contacts to it I'm going to go back to the All Contacts listing here so I could see all my contacts and I can select and Drag a contact into the group and it adds it. I can keep doing that for anything I need. I could also use the Command Key to select multiple contacts and then Drag both in there. So now when I look in here I can see all the contacts I've added. 

So this is kind of like a playlist in the Music App or an album in Photos. The contacts aren't really in this List. They are still just in your database of contacts. So if I remove one from the list, I'm going to use the Delete Key to do that, you could see I get the option to Remove From the List or Delete Entirely. By just removing from the List it is still in All Contacts. So you can continue to add contacts to this List. You can remove the contacts and have as many of these lists as you want. You can use one, say, for a group at work or all of your work colleagues, or people on a sports team you belong to, or your family, or friends, or any group you want. Create as many as you like. Use them as you like. Or you don't have to use them at all if you have no need for lists. 

With a List you can email everybody in the List at once. To do that you can select the List and Control Click on it, two-finger click on your trackpad, right click on your mouse, and one of the options here is Send Email To, and it is the entire group. Let's do that. It's going to launch the Mail App and you could see here at the top it's got the name of that group here. So if I were to Send a message the four people in that group would get this email. Now if you'd rather see the names of the people in the group in the Mail App you can set that over here in Mail, Settings and go to Composing and then there check, When Sending to Group Show All Member Addresses. So now when I do the same thing notice I get all of their email addresses up there. 

Another way you can send to a group is you can just type the group name. So I can type Test here and you could see it comes up with an email address there, but also the group and I can add it that way. 

You can also use groups just to quickly find an email address using this List here on the right. Click that Plus Button there and you select one of your groups. It gives you a shorter List than if you, say, selected All Contacts. So you could select a group here, like that. Then quickly find the one name that you wanted and select their email address. You could include multiple groups really easily. Just type one group like that. Let me select. Then I'll type another group like that and then it adds those as well. 

So on the iPhone and iPad you can go into your Contacts App. If you're at this level here looking at all of your contacts just go up one level to Lists. Now you're going to see the List that maybe you've already created on your Mac because they sync across on iCloud. You can also add your own List here with the button at the top right. You can give it a name like that and you can go into the List and easily add names to the List. So I could tap the Plus Button there at the top right and I could add different names and then Done. Now you could see all of the names that I've added there. If I want to remove one I could tap, Hold, and then there's Remove From List. I could add more. I could easily email everybody in this List with this handy email button at the top of the List. You could see it adds them all to the TO field there. But also in the Mail App I could simply type the name of the List and it will show the List there. I can tap it to select the entire List or I can tap here to the right to go into the List itself and add a specific name. 

You can actually use Drag and Drop to add to the List as well. I'm going to go back to All iCloud here and I'm going to select a few names here by tapping and holding and then dragging. Then while dragging I can tap another name and you can see it adds that to it. So I'm dragging two now. So I've got one finger still held down. With another finger I'm going to tap the Lists Button at the top left and then I could drop into the List there and I've added those names. 

So finally now we have the ability in iOS 16 and iPad OS16 to create and manage Lists right on our devices. We don't have to rely on our Macs to do it. But there are still a couple of features that are Mac Only. One of those is Smart Lists. You can create a Smart List and it is similar to a Smart Playlist in Music or Smart Album in Photos. Call it what you want and then set criteria for it. So, for instance, you can use your family's last name and then quickly create a Family Group. You can use the email address, like that, and quickly create a group from your company. You can choose various different criteria to have the Smart List created and it will automatically update. So if you added a new contact and it met this criteria it would automatically be added to the Smart List. But, the Smart List would only be seen on your Mac. You wouldn't see them at all on your iPhone or iPad.

Another thing you can only do on your Mac, but should be useable on your iPhone and iPad once you have it setup is setting the distribution list or a list here. That sounds a little confusing but it's actually a pretty simple function. If you select a List and then go to Edit and then Edit Distribution List you get a little view here of your list. It actually still calls it Group here in this interface. So you select it and what you can do here is choose things like an email address, phone number, address for each person. So, for instance, for these first two there's only one email address. But for this third person here there's two email addresses. So I could say if I ever email this List use this email address for this person. 

Another thing you can do on the Mac, and you could also do it on the iPhone and iPad, is export an entire List. So I can Control Click on it and then Export List to vCard and then save the card or I can simply Drag and Drop the entire List here and I have a standard format contacts file that can be imported by somebody else or maybe just used by me as a backup.

So, of course, if you're not using iCloud for this, if you're using Goggle, Yahoo, Outlook, some other server then you may not have all this functionality. So if something is not working for you, and you're sure you're using macOS Ventura or iOS 16 or newer and it is still not working then perhaps it is because you're not using iCloud to store your contacts but another system that doesn't support one of these functions. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.