Does Dictation substitute a contact’s name for a common word, fail to capitalize proper nouns, or mangle unusual spellings? You can fix these frustrations by adding—or subtly editing—entries in Contacts.

Two years after Apple introduced contact posters in iOS 17, our Do You Use It? poll shows that over half of respondents haven’t created a single one. The feature’s limited visibility and fussy creation process may explain the lackluster adoption.

Want to make your iPhone’s Phone app and contact cards more visually appealing? Adam Engst walks you through the often frustrating process of customizing contact avatars and posters. 

Mail will crash if you open its Previous Recipients window and then edit a contact in Contacts. This bug has existed since macOS 12 Monterey and continues to plague the betas of macOS 15 Sequoia.

If you try to print using the Lists style in Contacts in macOS 14 Sonoma, Contacts will freeze and require force-quitting. Worse, if Contacts gets stuck on Lists style, you won’t be able to print at all. Here’s how to recover.

After receiving an “undeliverable” holiday card back, Adam and Tonya Engst discovered that their approach to extracting data from Contacts to print labels inadvertently deleted leading zeroes in ZIP codes. Can they ever send snail mail to New England? Here’s what happened—and how to avoid similar errors.

It turns out that Contacts on the Mac stores extra invisible characters with every phone number, which can cause trouble when copying and pasting them into some online forms. Here’s what’s going on and how to work around the problem.