My Contacts/Address Book are totally screwed up now that I'm on the Cloud!

A new mac? How did you get contacts onto the mac in the first place? And concerning iCloud, do you have more than your mac that uses the same iCloud account to sync contacts?

As I recall, there's a setting for Address Book that determines whether the first name or last name is displayed first. I remember my wife had a number of her contacts reversed (first name in the last name slot) and this messed up the display. You might look at that closely - the same thing may be occuring.

If you are syncing another device via iCloud using the same account (to sync contacts, for example), be sure to turn off syncing in iTunes, otherwise you'll get duplicates (synced from two sources).

Susan Singer wrote:

To answer your first question, I had all of my contacts synched onto my OLD (very old) MAC via a cable from my iPhone.

As for the iCloud, my Mac and my iPhone both use the same cloud account. I have the settings set to display last name first, but that isn't happening consistently on both devices (mac and phone) so I'm not sure what else to do to fix that.

I also have a TON of duplicates on the Mac, but not (thankfully) on my phone because the default setting on the phone is set to "On my iPhone".

I will look into the itunes synching to see if that's an issue. Thanks!

Check address book for 2 accounts, On My Mac and iCloud, only use one of them (iCloud) unless you like duplicates.

Indexing can be fixed in Address Book>Preferences>General