Our contact agendas, especially if we do not clean them from time to time, can end up containing thousands of contacts. At the storage level it is not a problem (after all it is only text), but it can be a hassle if we want to have an organized notebook and efficient.
One way to achieve this in iCloud contacts is to create groups, such as “Family” and “Work,” in which to classify them appropriately. But many times these groups are created with good intention and end up not being used, creating more confusion instead of eliminating it and ending with an effect of disaster drawer. Today we are going to see Alternative and Subtle Ways to Sort iCloud Contacts.
Searches filtered with emojis and symbols: there are almost no limits
It’s as easy as place an emoji at the beginning or end of a contact’s first or last name. With that emoji you establish a very visual and immediate classification of which group or area of people that contact belongs to, and you can find all the contacts in that area by adding that emoji to the search field.
A quick example: if I place an iPhone emoji behind all the contacts of my Applesfera colleagues, I just need to search for that emoji in the Contacts application to find them easily. Remember that you can easily insert emojis in macOS by pressing CTRL + CMD + Space:
Yes, I can do the same by creating a group of contacts for them, but again: if that group is very dynamic we can end up not doing the regular task of keeping those groups organized, so that over time they end up being forgotten and ignored.
In addition, if an emoji does not convince you, you can also use a hashtag, unique word or symbol. Or if you don’t want it to be seen in the name, always you can place that emoji or “sneak” symbol on the field “Notes” contact. The results of searching for that emoji will not change.
There are thousands of emojis and symbols available for you to set the classification you want, and this trick can be extrapolated to more applications. Notes, calendar events, mailboxes … even in file and folder names. They are characters after all, with which we can take advantage of them very well when doing searches.