How to Change How Your iPhone 5 Contacts are Sorted in iOS 7

The contact information that you have on your iPhone is important when you need to be able to call someone, email them, or send them physical mail.

But as you scroll through the contacts on your device, you may be having trouble locating the contact that you need.

Our tutorial below will show you how to change how your iPhone 5 contacts are sorted in iOS 7 so that you can either look by first name or last name.

How to Switch the iPhone Contact Sorting Option

  1. Open Settings.
  2. Choose Contacts.
  3. Select Sort Order.
  4. Tap the preferred contact sorting option.

Our guide continues below with additional information on how to change how your iPhone 5 contacts are sorted in iOS 7, including pictures of these steps.

When you have a lot of contacts on your iPhone 5, it can be difficult to find someone that you don’t contact very often.

This is particularly noticeable when you only know someone’s first name and your contacts are sorted by last name or vice versa.

Fortunately, this is a customizable setting on your iPhone 5 in iOS 7, which can make it much easier to locate the correct contact.

So if your contacts are sorted by last name, and you need to find someone by their first name, then you can follow the steps below to change your contact sorting.

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How to Sort By First Name or Last Name in iOS 7 on the iPhone 5 (Guide with Pictures)

This is a setting that you can change as needed, so if you prefer to have your contacts sorted by first name but you have a specific situation where you need to sort by last name, you can simply switch the sort type, find the contact, then go back and switch it back to your preferred sorting method.

Additionally, the Spotlight Search feature that you can access by pulling down on your home screen will allow you to search for contacts by either name as well.

open spotlight search to find contacts

Step 1: Touch the Settings icon.

open the settings menu

Step 2: Scroll down and select the Mail, Contacts, Calendars option.

In newer versions of iOS, this setting has been moved to a dedicated Contacts menu instead.

open the mail, contacts, calendars menu

Step 3: Scroll to the bottom of the menu and touch the Sort Order option.

touch the sort order button

Step 4: Select your preferred method of contact sorting.

how to change the sort order in ios 7 on the iphone 5

Now that you know how to change how your iPhone 5 contacts are sorted in iOS 7, you can make it much less difficult to find a specific contact from your contacts list.

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