Change the way names are displayed on your BlackBerry

Plus a bonus tip at the end! You might enter both a first and last name for contacts in your address book, but when you browse through chances are you see them listed as you would normally: first name, last name. For many of us, and most personal BlackBerry users, this is fine and good. But a good many users, and business users in particular, might prefer to see their address books listed last name, first name.

It’s the way a rolodex works, so why not your BlackBerry address book? With a simple options tweak, you can do this easily. Just go to Options – Typing and Language – Language and Method. The top heading is Language and Methods, and under that you’ll see an item titled Global Name Display. The option by default is set to First, Last. You can change that to the opposite option and have your contacts listed Last Name, First Name.

Quick tip on changing your input language on the fly. In this Language and Method screen, you can change the shortcut key for that. By default it is Alt + Enter, but if you scroll down to the heading Input Language/Method Switching you can switch it to Shift + Space, or you can turn it off completely.