Custom duty: creating and getting rid of custom labels

Readers Rob and Katy have a question for us:

When you edit a contact’s phone number or email address, you have the ability to “Add Custom Label”. I created one, and now I want to delete it. How?

The iPhone’s contact management system is very similar to OS X’s Address Book. As in Address Book, the iPhone lets you add custom labels to any data field. So, for example, if you want to distinguish between a contact’s home and vacation home phone numbers, you might want to label one of the fields “Vacation.” Here’s how you do that:

Choose a contact from your contacts menu and hit the “Edit” button in the top right corner. Under each section of contact information (Phone, email, web page, address, etc.) you’ll see an “Add new…” option, marked by a green plus button.

Select the type of information you wish to add—say, a new phone number— and enter the number. Below that will be the label that the number will be assigned. If you don’t like what the iPhone’s picked for you, tap the label to go to the full list of labels (both included and custom). All the way at the bottom of the list you’ll find “Add Custom Label.” Tap that and you can enter and save any label you want.

So what if, like Rob, you want to get rid of a label? Not a problem. While you’re in that screen that lists all the labels, just tap the “Edit” button in the top right hand corner and you’ll see the little red minus signs appear next to each label, just as if you were deleting emails or text messages. Tap the minus sign and hit delete for the label you want to get rid of and you’re all set.

Category: Tips & Troubleshooting

Posted by Dan Moren on Jul 9 2007, 2:33 PM ET

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