Mac 911

HOW TO CHANGE YOUR NAME ON YOUR MAC’S USER ACCOUNT

People wind up with a new name, often one that better reflects who they are or have become, for all sorts of reasons. You don’t have to keep staring at your past identity indefinitely—macOS can keep up with the name you use now. It’s not obvious, but you don’t have to dig into the guts of macOS, either. Just take care to follow these steps carefully.

There are a couple of requirements:

> You can’t change the name of an account while you’re logged into that account, so you have to have least two separate accounts set up on the Mac.

> You must have administrative access from the account that you log into in order to change the other account’s full name.

Warning! As with anything involving system-level changes, I strongly recommend initiating a manual Time Machine backup or updating a clone on an external drive before you start in case something goes wrong.

It’s easy to set up a new account in macOS:

1. Open the Users & Groups preference pane.

2. Click the lock icon at the lower-left corner and authenticate yourself.

3. Click the plus sign (+) at the lower-left corner to add an account.

4. Fill out details, but be sure to choose Administrator from the New Account pop-up menu.

With an existing account you want to elevate to an administrator:

1. Open the Users & Groups preference pane.

2. Click the lock icon at the lower-left corner and authenticate yourself.