High Sierra Contacts Truncation Problem Workaround

Yes, the workaround I first saw floated on the internet, and now espoused by Apple Care apparently, was adding a space or a backspace to the notes field. The problem with that: when you look at a note, you DON’T KNOW if there’s more to it or not UNTIL you fiddle with it by adding or deleting. So even in contacts where you may only have 2 lines of data, you’re “testing” it with spaces and backspaces to see if there’s more. Thus most contact notes fields are suspect.

That’s why I’ve gone to adding line breaks. When I open the note, I don’t want to guess if there’s hidden data by messing around with editing. I want to see the data right away. All of it.

Contacts is simply a database. Databases have been available to the Mac since 1984, and databases back then didn’t hide or truncate the data like this. The construction of a simple database has been well-solved for the past 3 decades on the Mac, until High Sierra. I don’t think it’s too much to ask Apple to fix a simple database! One that runs a very important part of many people’s workday. It’s a glaring bug, and for some of us, it messes with our workflow every single day.

Also correct that the bug includes cursor problems that are rather hard to describe, other than to say that the cursor “stops working” after a bit and jumps to places it’s not supposed to be, but is still nonfunctional even in the wrong place. Since I seldom use arrow keys, I’ve not tried them, so thanks for the tip.

(Wow, we’re back to arrow keys. How 1970s.)

Spontaneously resolved, Estherbeat?? 😮 Wow, you lucky. No such luck here. Truncations all over the place in the Notes field of Contacts under 10.13.3. I'm slowly going through my contacts and putting in loads of carriage returns wherever I had previously made notes in paragraphs, turning my notes into lots of single lines of text.

Footnote: One workaround I read was to widen the Contacts window. This works only occasionally for me, and then only to add a few lines. Most of the time the paragraph-form text in the notes field is still truncated, regardless of full-screen width of the Contacts window. Sadly.

Also. You can view a large(ish) paragraph in the Notes field of a contact IF you have entered very little or no info in the phone/address fields. But add a phone number and an address to a contact, and the truncation of paragraphs in the notes field raises its ugly head.

Buggy!! Buggy buggy buggy.

In another thread, Luis said:

You should probably use feedback to report this problem to Apple. This is a user forum, so Apple does not actively monitor these threads.

http://www.apple.com/feedback

Question, under which macOS app would you report this? There is no reporting option for Contacts.

Ideas?

I'm on a personal mission to either get this Contacts Notes Field Truncation bug squashed, or to help people work around it. I've slowed down, taken a deep breath, and tried to do a decent job of collecting the other major threads addressing this issue. Look around, maybe you'll find other helpful suggestions. One thing is for sure, this bug is frustrating a lot of people.

https://macmost.com/forum/high-sierra-contacts-is-the-notes-section-truncated.ht ml (article)

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8158156 (locked)

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8253002

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8215439

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8182853

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8176919 (locked)

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/6885005 (with a ‘facebook’ fix)

Have not checked in for awhile, looks like Apple fixed it! Yay!

Trying to lay down some breadcrumbs for the 'High Sierra Contacts Notes Truncated' issue, for whomever may be searching, since it seems all the previous threads on this topic have been closed.

Contacts note area is truncated in High Sierra