Help Desk

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. macOS can keep up with the name you use, so you aren’t staring at your past identity indefinitely. It’s not obvious, but you don’t have to dig into the guts of macOS, either. Just take care to follow steps carefully.

There are a couple of requirements:

• You can’t change the name of an account while logged into the account you’re changing, so you have to have least two accounts on the Mac.

• You must have administrative access from the account you log into 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 in case something goes wrong.

It’s easy to set up a new account:

1. Open the Users & Groups preference pane.

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

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