200 Mac Tips And Tricks

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com and  here's a huge collection of Mac tips. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great  group of more than a thousand supporters.   Go to macmost.com/patreon. There you  can read more about the Patreon campaign   join us and get exclusive  content and course discounts. So let's start off here in the Finder.  If you're using icon view like this   it's easy to get the icons kind of out of  alignment and really messy. You can clean   them up a number of ways. Go to view, clean  up and it will lock everything into a grid. But to really clean it up go to view, cleanup by.   Choose something like name and it will  arrange them all by name in a perfect grid. I however rarely use icon view and  usually switch to one of the others.   There's a button here that allows  you to switch between the four modes.   If you're wondering why this is only one button  and then a list that pops up it's because   the window is too small. If you increase the size  of the window you eventually get the four buttons. Here list view is one of the most useful views.  Here you can click on these little arrows to the   left of any folder to open it up and then you can  open up subfolders or close subfolders like that. You can also hold the option key down click on  one of these and it will open up the folder and   all of the subfolders inside it.  Option clicking will close them all.   You can also navigate with a keyboard  very easily. So if I select this first   folder I can use the down arrow to go to  other folders and the up arrow as well. I can use the right arrow to open something up,  left arrow to close it. So now I can navigate   down to any level that I want to get to the  file I need. Left arrow will also close these.   And in list view you've got columns up here  you can set the sort order to any one of these   columns by clicking on it. So i'm sorting by size  now click on it again to change the direction   like that. You can also rearrange these by  clicking and dragging. So I can move size here   to the right if you control click right click or  two finger click on the trackpad on any of these   you can add or remove columns. And you can also  resize these by dragging the line in between them. Another view I like is column view. This  allows you to see all of your folders here   and then you can go to subfolders  and then keep digging down like that.   And you can use the keyboard as  well to navigate through these. You can change the column widths by dragging  the line here. If you option drag it will   change all the columns at once and set  that as the default width for a column. You can also double click on any  divider line and it will snap to   the perfect size for that column. When in column  view you usually see a preview here on the right.   If you select a file you'll see a preview of it  there. You can also see that in list view as well.   You just need to go to view and then show preview  and then it will appear there. That then changes   to hide preview so you can get rid of it. It  will even be there in icon view if you allow it. You also have two bits of information here at  the bottom. This is the path bar and the status   bar. If you don't see those you can turn them  on and off right here path bar and status bar. When you select a file you can get info on it  by going to file get info or command I. Now   no matter what file you select after that  the info window is still going to show you   the info for the file that you originally asked  for. But if instead you go to file get info and   hold the option key down that changes to show  inspector or option command I. This brings up   the inspector window here and this will change to  show you information about whatever is selected. Better yet it will also show you information  for multiple items. So I can select three   items here it says three items and gives me the  total size when you're in a folder like this. If you ever want to go up a level all you  need to do is use go enclosing folder or   command up arrow. You can also  hold the command key down and   click on the title right here and you  can go up to any level above this one. To jump to some common places on your drive   you can use the go menu and there are  keyboard shortcuts for this as well.   So for instance to get to the documents folder  it's really handy to use shift command o. But   you can get to other places like for instance  the applications folder is shift command a. The   main computer level is shift command c. And  your downloads folder is option command l. There's also a hidden one here if you go  to the go menu and hold the option key down   you'll see library up here. That's your user  library not the system library folder. So you   can easily get to it with go and then  hold option and then select library. So whatever view you're in you've  got more view options under view   show view options or command j and gives you a  ton of different things that you can change here. For instance the icon size here can go larger. You  can select to calculate all sizes meaning all the   folder sizes as well as file sizes. And this  will change depending upon what view you're in   so in icon view it changes to this and now you  can change the icon size. You can also change the   text size of the labels or the position so the  labels on the right rather than the bottom. In   an icon view you can even set a background color  for the folder or a picture as the background. In   column view you get these options here including  whether or not to even show the icons. This gives   you more space for the names in each column. And  in gallery view you can select the thumbnail size. If you need to rename a file. You could select  it and then go to file and then rename but the   shortcut for that is simply pressing return that  enters rename mode and it automatically selects   everything before the file extension. If you  want to select everything including the file   extension a quick command a will do that  for you and now you can type the new name. You can also compress files really easily by  control clicking right clicking or two finger   clicking on the trackpad and selecting the  compress option. This will quickly create a   zip file for that file that you have selected. And if you select multiple files and then do  it for that you'll get one file that contains   all three .Really handy for sending a  collection of files to somebody over email. In the left sidebar here you should  see favorites. As the thing on top   you can open and close it like that.  If you have icloud drive turned on   using desktop and documents folders you'll see  desktop and documents here but you can drag those   to favorites if you'd rather see them up there.  And then you no longer need to have icloud open. You could also add any other folders you want here  so if we go back up to the documents folder if I   want to have this business folder here I can  easily add it. And now it's here in favorites.   Now whenever I want to go to that folder I can  easily click there and jump to it. Plus if I   ever want to drag something into that folder I  could do that by clicking and dragging right into   the sidebar folder. I don't have to navigate  to that folder in another window or anything. Another way to move files in the Finder  besides drag and drop is copy and paste.   So for instance I could select these two  files here and I could do edit copy or command   c. I can go to another location like this  one and if I do command v it would paste   those two items make a copy of  those two items in this location.   If I hold the option key down so use option  command v it will move them there. So to   move files I can do command c to copy go to the  new location and option command v to move them. If you have no Finder window open  and you create a new Finder window   it will go to a default location.  You could set that in preferences   under general new Finder window show. And you  could select documents you can select your   home folder you can select anything you want  using other and select any folder anywhere. Also here in Finder preferences. You can  select some default things that are included   in the sidebar so for instance recents. You can  turn that on or off airdrop on or off and other   common folders as well. This is also where you  can decide whether things like external drives   or connected servers will  appear here in the sidebar. When you want to delete a file you normally would  select it drag it and add it to the trash. But a   keyboard shortcut for that is simply use command  delete and that will move something to the trash. You can also get something out of the trash and  have it go back to its original location. I've   just removed that file here from this folder let's  go to this folder here and i'll also delete this   file. Now when I look at the trash I can see two  files here. I can select them both and then choose   file and put back and it will put both of  those back into their original locations. When you're looking at a folder like this that  is a mix of folders and files sometimes it's   useful to see the folders on top. You can do  that by going to Finder preferences and under   advanced change the setting here to keep  folders on top in windows when sorting by   name. And now you can see how these appear  on the top. Make sure you're sorting by name   if you're shorting by anything else like  size then it's going to mix the folders in. Another preference for the Finder is here under  advanced and it's when performing a search and   set the default scope for that search. So you  can always have it start by searching this mac,   search the current folder, or use the  previous search scope. So for instance   when set to search the current folder and I  start a search here with command f you can see   it starts with the current folder. I  could switch to this mac if I want to   but the current folder is going to be the default  every time I use the shortcut to get there. And speaking of search when I do command f for  find I can have multiple search criteria here.   So like for instance I could say kind is image and  I can hit the plus button there and say also the   name matches and anything with img in the name.  I could also hold the option key down here and   the plus changes to three dots. If I select that  I can group together criteria and say any of the   following are true all of the following are true  or none of the following are true. So these allow   you to do basically and or not statements inside  of a search and get really complex searches. You also don't just have to settle for these  sets of things to search for. You can go to   other and there are a ton of different  criteria you can use for a search.   A lot of these apply to things like videos and  images. It's the metadata inside the files. But   there's all sorts of interesting things here that  could help you find just the files that you want. And back to using the trash. Let's say  you have a bunch of files in the trash   you want to review them before you delete them  but there's a file you want to delete right now.   If you select a file and go to file move to trash  or command delete it'll just add it to the trash.   But if you do option command delete it changes to  delete immediately this item will skip the trash   and be immediately deleted. Try not to use this.  The trash is there for a reason as a safety net. Now usually when we think of tabs we think of the  browser. But you can use tabs in Finder as well.   I do all the time. So here i've got this folder  open i'm going to do command t to open a new tab   and I can go to a different location here. So i've  got two locations open it's easy to actually move   between the two of them. I can actually drag and  drop using spring loading to move over the tab   here and it will then open up that tab and now I  can drop that file in. And if you have multiple   tabs open you can show all the tabs just like  you do in the browser. You can go to view and   then show all tabs or shift command and then the  backslash and then it brings them up like this   even with a plus button here to create a new  tab. Then you can jump to the tab that you want. And by the way spring loading works with  folders as well so let's say I want to move   a file here into this folder. I can hold it  over the folder and wait it'll open it up and   then I can drop it in. It even works in multiple  levels so for instance I can go into this folder   and then into this folder and then drop it there. Now let's look at some tips for  using windows. You can of course   click and drag anywhere at the top here  that doesn't have a button in it to move a   window around. But there's also another way to  reposition a window that a lot of people like.   To set it up you need to go into System  Preferences and then accessibility   and then scroll down to pointer control. Click  on trackpad options and here you'll see enable   dragging and then set it to three finger  drag. Once you do that you can use three   fingers anywhere at the top and it will drag the  window around. It only works at the top though. You can also change the size of the window by  dragging the sides or the corners. So you can   click and drag any side including the top and  the bottom to resize the window or any corner   to resize from that corner. Now if  you hold the option key down it does   the current side and the opposite side at the  same time. So you can see how it's doing the   left and right there or the top and bottom  there. The same thing is true for corners   so you can do both corners or in other words  all four sides by holding the option key. Now   you can also double click on any side and  it will snap to the edge of the window like   that. If you hold the option key down and double  click it does that side and the opposite side.   So here I have both the left and right snap to  the sides of the screen. And then if you option   double click on any corner then it will snap all  four corners to the sides there. So it's a way to   maximize the window size that works better than  using window zoom because that doesn't always   go to the maximum size. Instead it goes to the  maximum size that makes sense for the content of   the window. But option double clicking on a corner  will always maximize it to the size of the screen. MacOS also has windows snapping but a lot  of people don't even realize this. So here   i've got two windows and if I take this  window and move it over to this one here   it's going to appear to snap to that one. If  I keep moving it eventually will go beyond it   but it will kind of stick to that window. So  if you set this window up like this and you   want this next window to be right next to it you  can it'll kind of stick there. It'll even stick   to the top there and then I could easily  have one window exactly next to the other. You can also automatically position windows  by using a special command hidden here in the   green button. Usually if you roll over the green  button you'll see tile window to left side or   right side that goes into split view mode but. If  you hold the option key down these change to move   window to left or right side. So I can have this  window take up exactly the left side of the screen   and then this window take up exactly the  right side of the screen. They also appear   under window you see tile if I hold the option  key down it changes to move and now I can have   two windows taking up exactly half the screen  without having to manually position them. Here are some menu bar tips. In the apple menu  you've got things like restart and shut down.   If you choose restart it's going to come  up with dialogs and all that. But if you   hold the option key down the three dots goes  away and you can skip the confirmation dialogs.   Same for shutdown and also for log out.  Holding the option key down also allows   you to go directly to system information.  Usually you would choose about this mac   click system report. But if you hold the option  key down you can go right to system info.   And there's also kind of a hidden one here. We  expect to use option but shift will actually   change force quit to force quit Finder. So if  you ever need to force quit or restart the Finder   you can use the keyboard shortcut option  shift command and then escape to do that. My favorite tip for the menu bar is using the  help search here to find commands. You would   expect to find documentation here but it does more  than that. So for instance under view you've got   sort by and then you've got size. If I were to  go to the help menu here and type size you can   see it finds that menu item by its name and I can  actually select it here. So if you forget where   a hidden menu command is in any app you can  use the help menu to find it and activate it. And you can get to the help menu  with the keyboard shortcut command   shift and then the question mark key. And  it's automatically ready for you to type   in search so you type in search down arrow  to the command and then return to use it. Finder also has a really unique window under  edit. It's got show clipboard and this will   show the contents of the clipboard whatever's in  there. So whatever you last copied with command c. Let's look at more System Preferences tips. Of  course there are a ton of tips in here. Let's   start off in general and there's one here called  close windows when quitting an app. If you select   that every time you quit an app with command q or  file quit it will close all of the open windows so   the next time you open the app there are going to  be no documents or windows open. If you have this   turned off and you quit an app and you've got a  bunch of windows open the next time you launch the   app all those will return. So choose which one you  prefer right here in System Preferences general. Also notice that you could change  the wallpaper tinting here.   It may look like the background for this window  is white but it's actually tinted a little purple   because of the background. If I turn  this off you can see the difference. Another good one here is sidebar icon  size. So if I bring up a Finder window   I could see the icons here in the sidebar  and I can change that to large or small. Under dock and menu bar there are two check  boxes at the bottom as long as you have   dock or menu bar selected here on the left. One  is to automatically hide and show the menu bar   in full screen. If you turn that off you'll  get the menu bar even in full screen apps.   And then the one above that is automatically  hide and show the menu bar on the desktop.   So the menu bar normally is there but if I  select that the menu bar goes away giving you   extra screen real estate. Moving the  pointer to the top brings it back. There are a lot of options here for the dock  that you can set according to what you prefer.   Some people prefer not to have the  dock at the bottom of the screen   at all but to have it set to the left  or right side of the screen instead. Also you may see in the menu bar the three  most recent applications that you've opened   that are not normally in the dock. That option  is right here. A lot of people don't like having   that there they want their dock to remain the  same at all times so just have that turned off. Now here in the sidebar if you scroll all the  way down and go to clock this is where you have   all the settings for how the clock appears. So you  can decide whether or not the date or day of the   week is there, what type of clock to show, whether  to show am pm, and all of that. You can even have   the clock announce the time on the hour half hour  quarter hour in any voice installed on your mac. Under mission control there's the hidden feature  hot corners. Click on that and you can set up   any corner to perform a variety of functions.  So this will be triggered when you move your   pointer to there. So for instance you can have  launchpad appear when you move to the top right.   There are a lot of different options and you can  simply select to have it turned off. But also   you can combine this with a modifier key. So for  instance I can hold the command key down and now   launchpad will only appear if I hold the command  key down and move my pointer to the top right. In siri a lot of people don't know that  you can change the siri voice. There are a   whole bunch of different ones so you could  go to voice variety and select one here   and then select the voice. For americans  there are actually four different siri   voices now and you can pick which one  that you want under language and region. You of course set the preferred languages used  throughout your mac but you can also customize   those per app. So for instance if you want to use  one language for just about everything that you do   but maybe for word processing you're going  to use another language you can choose the   app to use for word processing and  set a different language for that. A lot of really interesting things are available  under accessibility. Even if you don't strictly   need these features they can be really useful for  everybody. For instance under zoom you can use   zoom here with a keyboard shortcut and what you'll  get is a little window here that moves around   with the mouse and magnifies what's under the  screen. And it's really easy to turn on and off   with that keyboard shortcut to zoom in and  out and to change how it works. It's really   handy when something is a little too small  to see especially if you're editing images. Under display you've got the ability to  reduce the transparency just like we saw   in System Preferences earlier. But it works with  more things like the dock. And also you can choose   increase contrast and it will outline things  like this giving your mac kind of a retro look. If you find the text in the menu bar a little  too small to see you can also change the menu   bar size to a larger size. Under audio there's  the handy thing here to flash the screen   when an alert sound occurs and this is handy  for when you're in a noisy environment or you   like to have the volume turned down on your  mac. And under siri here you can enable type   to siri when you do that instead of speaking  to siri you actually type something. And you could couple that with going into siri  preferences here and then turning off voice   feedback. So now siri is completely silent I can  ask questions by typing and just get responses   by seeing them there on the screen.  This is handy in an office environment   where you don't want to be speaking out  loud to your computer or having siri tell   everybody the information that you're looking up. Now under keyboard there's  a lot here that you can do.   If you go to shortcuts you can set the shortcut  for anything in any app as long as it's in a   menu. So for instance in Finder if I go to edit  there's that show clipboard I showed you before.   There's no keyboard shortcut for it but I  can create one by going to app shortcuts   clicking the plus button typing  exactly the name of the menu item. Setting the application. In  this case it will be Finder.   And then setting a keyboard shortcut  so i'll do control option command   c and add. And now in the Finder here i'll see  that that's got this keyboard shortcut and it   works and you can always go back and change these  very easily you can remove them. And it also works   to change some of the default keyboard shortcuts  for things you can go in and alter what it is. Another handy thing here is use  text replacements. So you can   set up any one thing to be replaced with something  else. So for instance I could type something like   xtest and have that replaced with this is a test.  Now when i'm typing in an app could be textedit   could be pages could be mail I can type that and  when I hit space or return it replaces it with   what I want. You can also use this as an easy  way to type emoji that you use all the time. So   for instance I can do something like exclamation  point celebrate and then do control command space   look for the little celebration emoji there. And  now instead of having to remember how to type that   or bring up the emoji and special character  viewer I can just type !celebrate and it   replaces it with that emoji. You can use that for  special symbols and all sorts of things as well. Under displays if you have multiple  displays connected to your mac   you can set which one of the main display by  putting the menu bar there. See how there's   a menu bar over this display you can click and  drag that menu bar and put it on another display.   Whichever display has the menu bar  is the primary display for your mac. If you have multiple macs in your house then you  could go to sharing and then go to content caching   and there if you turn on content caching. You  can select shared content only icloud content   or all content. So things like software update  and your iCloud content will download to this   mac and be shared by other things. It's  going to use extra space on your drive so   do this if you've got one mac that has  a big hard drive and it's kind of your   main mac and then you have other macs in your  household if you turn this on it'll basically   speed up things like updates and accessing  icloud files for all the other machines. Let's take a look at some launchpad tips.  Of course you can use launchpad by clicking   on it here in the dock. But it's usually  easier to do a keyboard shortcut if you go   back into System Preferences keyboard  shortcuts and then you look at launchpad   here you've got show launchpad and  you can set a shortcut for that.   So i've set that to shift command space here  so now shift command space brings up launchpad. Now you may think that the best way to launch  apps is spotlight and it usually is. So if I type   command space and start typing something usually  the app comes up pretty quick. But sometimes it   doesn't depending upon what options you've got for  spotlight it could take a little while for the app   to actually show up and then you can launch it.  But launchpad is usually lightning fast. So shift   command space and start typing just like before  and return and you can launch it with no delay. Another tip for launch pad is you  can click and hold or control click   on the icon here and you get an alphabetical list   of items starting with a at the bottom. And if  you control click on it and then type a letter   it will jump right to that section and you can use  the up and down arrows and then return to launch. If you're annoyed by having a ton of apps  in launchpad you can always combine things   into folders. So you can just drag and drop a  couple of icons onto each other and create folders   and you can place multiple apps in  there. You can even just create a   folder for all the apps that you  really just don't want to see in   launchpad and stick it out of the  way at the end to clean things up. So here's some spotlight tips. Of course you  do command space to bring up spotlight search.   But before you do that it pays to speed it  up a bit by going into System Preferences   and then going to spotlight and then unchecking  things that you don't really need. For instance   you're probably not going to be using spotlight to  look up fonts and you may not be using it to look   up mail preferring to do that inside the mail app.  So turn off the things that you don't want to find   in spotlight and now you can do really cool things  like use it as a calculator. Not only can you do   basic calculations like this but you can also  do really complex things. Like for instance   some things with parentheses that are not easy to  do using a calculator. You can even use functions   like square root or sine. And it's handy for unit  conversions so for instance you can do 60 inches   and it will give you some common conversions for  that like meters. But you can do in and then a   unit like that and get it in something else so you  know 50 km in miles will give you that result. You   can also do currency conversions so if I were to  type something like 100 I would get the price in   euros. But I could do in yen and it will give me  yen. And it's looking up the current price online. And you can even look up other information online.  To enable that i'm going to go back here into   settings and turn on siri suggestions. And now I  can do things like weather in new york. And you   can see it gives me the weather there. If I then  hit tab it will then activate this item and give   me all this information here. You can do sports  by typing a team name and then tab will give you   details. You can do stocks and then tab will give  you a chart and everything. You can do flights   and you even get a map showing its  location. You can type a location   and it will look up that address and then if you  hit tab you get it on a map and you get lots of   other information as well. As a matter of fact you  can look up things in wikipedia using spotlight so   just type something in spotlight like that   and then if you look under siri knowledge down  here. And I can arrow down to it or command arrow   to jump to the next category so right there you  can see I get wikipedia information right here. One frustrating thing about the  spotlight search field here is   you can drag it and then it's no longer  centered. So getting it back to center   you either have to kind of do it manually. But  you can also use this spotlight icon here in   the menu bar if you click and hold it it will  eventually snap back to its original location. So let's take a look at the dock. There  are a lot of ways to customize the dock of   course you can add any apps that you want.  In the Finder create a new Finder window   and go to the applications folder and then  select any app that you want to add to the   dock and just drag it into the dock at any  position you can add it there. To remove it   simply drag it up and away like that. You can also  rearrange the order of apps in the dock like that. Now the left side of the dock is for apps the  right side of the dock is for files and folders.   So if you want to add a folder to the dock add it  to the right side and then it will appear there.   When you click it it will come up. This is called  a stack. You can control click right click or two   finger click and change how the content is viewed.  So you can have it be fan which looks like this.   You could have it be grid which looks  like this. And you could have it be   list which looks like this. And it's handy for  digging down into subfolders as well. You could   sort any way you want and have it displayed as  a folder or a stack of items. You could also add   files here so if there's a file that you access  all the time you can add it to the right side   of the dock and to open it. All you need to  do is click it and that file will open now. The notification center here on the right is  highly customizable. Just scroll down to the   bottom and you'll see edit widgets then you'll  be in the special mode where you can add widgets   from a variety of different apps. There'll  be built-in apps but also third-party apps   that you've added to your mac. A lot of hidden  functionalities here for instance in calendar   there's a monthly calendar that you could add.  In news you could add news for a specific topic   and special topic or source. For notes you could  add for a folder containing a list of notes or a   single note that appears there. And while you're  editing you can drag and drop to rearrange these.   You can also click to access  options for each individual item. Control center is where you'll find a lot of  different settings for things on your mac.   It's easier to access them here than  System Preferences. If you move your   pointer over them and you see a little arrow  like that that means you can click the arrow   and dig down deeper. You could also drag  and drop items from control center into   the menu bar. So for instance I could drag  sound up here and add a sound icon and then   access those items here without having  to go to control center to get to them. These menu bar items here can be rearranged  by holding the command key down and clicking   and dragging left to right. And if you drag  down till you see the x you can remove one. So here are some tips for typing. I'm going to use  mail as an example here but you could be typing in   pages or textedit or even in a form in Safari.  So if you need to type an accent mark just get   to that letter with the accent mark and instead  of just quickly pressing the key press and hold   and then you'll get a list of  accent marks for that letter.   You can either type the number of the  accent mark you want or use the pointer   to click it. If you want to type an emoji  or any symbol use control command space   and then you can select the emoji or symbol.  There's a huge list of them but you can use search   up here to find what you want. If you don't find  exactly what you want with the first search term   you try try another to see what you come up with.  And this is useful for finding symbols as well. Now while typing the position of the  text cursor is the blinking line.   And you can use the arrow keys left  and right to move back and forth.   If you hold the option key down you can move  by word which is usually a much quicker way to   move around in your text. If you hold the shift  key while using the arrow keys it selects text   and that works with the option key as  well. So shift option will select by word. Of course using the delete key will delete  the previous character but if you want to   delete forward you can hold the fn key and then  delete and it will delete the character in front. There are a couple different ways to auto  complete on the mac. By default you should see   auto completions like that and then just hitting  a space will auto complete. But you can also press   f5 or the fn key and f5 depending upon your  settings and it will bring up a list of   completions and you can select one also. Instead of using a period and a  space at the end of a sentence   you can just use two spaces and it  will give you a period and a space   instead. This is a setting in System Preferences  under keyboard text add period with double space. There's also a variety of easy text  transformations that you can use   so you can select some text and then  go to edit transformations and you   can make everything uppercase or you can make  everything lowercase or capitalize every word. Searching for things in text involves using  command f and then searching and it will find   the first occurrence of that. You can always after  that use command g to find the next occurrence. If you want something that you've typed to be  read back to you a very useful technique for   editing and checking your text you can go to edit   speech and start speaking and  it will speak the selected text. You could also use two different types of  dictation. The simplest type is in System   Preferences under keyboard go to dictation and  enable that. And you'll see the shortcut here in   this case pressing ctrl twice and then you can  dictate short passages instead of typing them. Thank you period So in your keyboard you usually see just one dash  to the right of the zero key. This is actually a   hyphen that you use to hyphenate words. If  you want to use an n-dash which is usually   for ranges like 100 to 200 instead  of using that use option and the dash   for that type of hyphen. If  you want to use the even longer   m dash for separating parts of a sentence  do option shift and dash to get the m dash. If you have a lot of icons on your desktop you can  do a bunch of different things to clean them up   just like with regular Finder windows. If  you select the desktop and i'll click on the   background here to make sure it's selected I can  go to view and then I could clean up which will   move things to a grid position. But I could also  do view cleanup by and say by name which will move   them starting at the top right and sort them.  But you could also control click on the desktop   and do things like use stacks and this will group  together like items like these images into a stack   that you could open or close. You can  group stacks by something other than kind   for instance you can do it by date created  and it will group them by years or months or   things like yesterday and today. And also  if you select the desktop and go to view   show view options you'll see lots of options here  like the icon size grid spacing text size put the   text on the right side and even show item info  which will do things like show image dimensions. Now let's look at some Safari tips. In Safari one  of the most useful things I find is having the   favorites bar turned on so you can go to view and  then show favorites bar and what you're going to   see here are the bookmarks that you have inside  of the favorites folder. The favorites folder is   a normal folder in bookmarks and you can add  different bookmarks or create folders inside   of favorites. If you select favorites here  click new folder you can create a new folder.   The only difference is the favorites folder has  a special function where it can be displayed here   as a bar here. And it's extra useful if  you use folders here rather than putting   the actual bookmarks right at the top level. So  now here in the favorites bar I can click and   then select a different bookmark. You can also  open in new tabs here so if I wanted to access   all of my business web pages instead  of opening four different pages here   I can open a new tabs and it will open all  four of these bookmarks in four different tabs. And speaking of tabs if you click here you can  see the different tab groups that you've got.   Maybe you haven't created any yet but if you use  multiple tabs like this you can at any time you   want click here and create a new tab group with  them and then have these different tab groups   showing different sets of tabs.  It's just an organizational tool   whereas before you may have had 20 different  tabs now you can say have five tab groups   with four tabs in each making it a little bit  easier for you to see which tabs are where. Now when viewing an article in Safari often the  best way to read it is to do it in reader view.   So you can go to view and then show reader   and then it comes up in this way and you can see  the text of the article usually the images as well   without all the navigation elements and without  the ads. There's usually a button right here   for you to enter and exit reader view as well.  And of course the shortcut comes in handy.   If you see an article you want to read but you  don't have time right now the best thing to do   is not bookmark it which is kind of a way to  permanently save it but just simply add it to   the reading list. So under bookmarks select add  to reading list and then go to the reading list   sidebar here and you can see all the articles that  you've saved for reading later on. Now let's say   there's a site that you go to where you always  want to see things in reader view well you could   do that by going to Safari preferences and then  go to websites and then you're going to see here   a list of sites and a list of features so for  instance for reader view. You can select this   and see the site that you're currently at and  then say I want it to always be on for the site   you can also select the default for others  although reader view probably it's not a good idea   to have that on by default because you won't be  able to see a lot of the content on some websites. You could do the same thing for lots of other  things. Like for instance if there's a website   that's always asking for your location because  say it's giving you location-based information   like weather or directions or something you can  go to location and instead of having it ask each   time you could simply allow it for that website.  This is really handy for auto play so you can have   auto play for a site set to allow it or don't  allow it if there's sound or never auto play.   So that way the sites that have video you just  want the video to play when you get to the site.   You can have that happen but for other sites  you have to actually start the video manually. And by the way you can use picture and picture to  watch any video that you see in Safari sometimes   it's a little tricky like here in youtube. If you  control click on the video first you're going to   get a set of controls from youtube. But ctrl click  a second time and now you'll get Safari's controls   and here you can go into picture-in-picture  mode. The video comes out like that   you can actually move this window away and  do other work while the video is playing. Safari also has built-in translation when you  go to a page that's not using the same language   here you can click there and then translate  web page and it will translate the text   for you. But you also have systemwide translation  in MacOS Montere.y so you can select some text   like this control click on it and then select  translate just to translate that portion. If you ever work with a website that you need  to log into like any social media site or things   like that and you have multiple accounts it can  be tricky to always be logging out of your main   account to log into a secondary account. But you  could just create a new private window in Safari.   This private window and the main window  act like completely different browsers   so you can say be logged into one twitter account  in your main window and use a private window   to log into another twitter account. And as soon  as you close that private window you're logged   out of that account now and you haven't logged  out of the main account in your first window. One of the most powerful changes you can make in  Safari is to change your search engine. If you go   into Safari preferences and then to search you  don't have to use google as your default search   engine you can use any one of these. So change  to the one that you want including these last   two which are a little better for privacy.  And just because you set one up as your main   search engine doesn't mean that you can't go  manually to another search engine and use that.   The default search engine is just what is used  when you type something in the field at the top. Also if you don't like just seeing the website  at the top and you want to see the full address   that's also a preference in Safari.  Just go to preferences advanced   and select show full website  address to see the whole thing. Here here's some tips for the productivity  app starting with contacts. If you have   an address and contacts you can  actually go to the map location   by clicking here but better yet  you can actually look up the name   just like it was the name of a location. So if  I go into contacts and I do command f for find   and then search for that name it'll come up  with the address that's listed for that contact. You can also add fields here for the phonetic  pronunciation of the name of the person or   company it's under more fields so phonetic first  and last name phonetic company. And this will   help siri understand you when you say the name  and pronounce the name correctly back to you. Contacts app also has some interesting printing  functionality that a lot of people don't realize.   First select all the names that you want to print  then go to file print and then here you can print   as a list. You can do it as envelopes and  you can do it as mailing labels as well. If you ever want to send somebody  all of the information in a contact   all you need to do is drag and  drop it and it becomes a standard   vcf file you can attach that to an email or  send it to them in a message any way you want. The reminders app has some great functionality  for tagging reminders so you can add a tag to the   actual reminder itself just by using the hashtag  symbol and a word or you can add it as a tag in a   separate field here. You can see if I go to info  there actually is a spot here for tags and then   you can view all of the reminders from all the  different lists that have that tag applied to it. If you have a list and want to  apply tags to everything in the list   you can select the list go  to file convert to smart list   and it will add a tag to every single item in  the list and create a smart list using that tag. You can convert reminders to text by  just having a text editor open like   textedit here and then selecting a  bunch of reminders. Drag and drop them   in and you get the text from those  reminders now as text in your document. The notes app has the ability to lock notes. So  you select any note that you want to lock. You   select lock node here at the top it'll ask you to  set password if you've already created a password   for locked notes it'll ask you to enter it and  now. This is a locked note. At any time I can   close all the locked notes and you can see  it's locked and I can't get access to it   until I enter the password. You can  always remove the lock from any note. If there's note you want to see in a window by  itself just double click it and it will open   up in its own window. But that window will  still go behind other windows like that.   But if you select the window  there and say window float on top   now this window always will float on top  of everything else. So even if you open up   something like say a browser window this notes  window is going to be here making it really easy   for you to take notes without the window  disappearing behind things all the time. Your mac has a handy app on it called activity  monitor. Just bring up the app and you can see a   variety of different things here. For instance you  can see all the processes and sort by the amount   of cpu they're using or the amount of memory that  they're using or energy or disk access. Note that   the icon here in the dock actually shows you  a graph of what's going on and you can change   that graph by going to view and then dock icon.  And you can select different modes for the dock   icon. If your mac has trouble going to sleep go to  energy and then look under preventing right here   and then look here for what's preventing sleep.  So for instance right now my screen recording   software is preventing the mac from going  to sleep as it should but if your mac isn't   going to sleep you may want to check here to see  what is listed as yes that you may want to quit. Here are some tips for the mail app. So in  the mail app and preferences there are some   settings here that you may want to change. For  instance doc unread count will show you this red   dot here with the number of unread messages.  It could be for inbox only but having it set   to all mailboxes can sometimes show a lot of  unread email. For instance all the email that's   automatically filtered into other folders. Or you  may just want to have it just so unread for today. So under composing there are some settings here  for what happens when you reply to an email   so you can have the original text of the message  automatically quoted. So when I respond to an   email like this you can see that's quoted there.  But you don't have to settle for that you can   alter it on a case-by-case basis. If there's a  question somewhere in here and you just want to   have that quoted select it then hit reply and only  the selected portion will be there. The setting   for this is when quoting text and replies or  forwards. And then select include selected text. For signatures you have to set your default  signature. Just adding one isn't enough. You   actually have to go for each account and drag it  in and then set it up as the default. So for this   one choose the signature like that so then when I  reply to this email it's automatically put there.   And you can decide whether the signature is placed  above quoted text or below it by this checkbox. When you're replying to a message or  sending out a new one if you attach an image   make sure you pay attention to  where it says image size right here.   You'll see actual large medium or small if the  image is already pretty small you may not see   large or medium. So you can select one of these  and it will compress the image down making it   much smaller and easier for the other person to  receive. Actual size will be the original image. Now sometimes when you start to type in  the to field here you'll type something   and it will auto complete with maybe an  email address you don't even recognize.   It's getting that from a list of previous  recipients. It's automatically building that   list every time you get a new piece  of email. But you can go to window   and then previous recipients and then select  as many as you want or select them all and   remove from list to have it stop auto filling  in email addresses that aren't in your contacts. So here's some notification center tips when you  get notifications at the top they appear here on   top of your widgets you can click here and it will  expand it. And you also see these three dots click   there and you can mute notifications for this app  for an hour for the rest of the day or just turn   off notifications right here for this app. You  can also jump to notifications preferences which   goes to System Preferences and then notifications  and focus. So you can see it's selected that app   here and I can change how things look. So you can  set exactly how notifications for this app work.   Either no notifications at all only banners which  will appear and then go away and alerts which   appear and then stay there. Both banners and  alerts will appear here in notification center   though when you bring it up but you can turn it  off with this check box here so they don't appear. You also have control of the badge app icon  that's this little thing here like for mail   you see that one there. So if I go to  mail and I turn off the badge app icon   you can see that number goes away. So if you  have some app that's got a big number there and   you just don't care about that you can turn  that off and not be bothered by the number. Each app has slightly different notification  settings so you may want to go in to each of   these apps and take a look and change it  to how you want. You can always just turn   notifications off completely for that app. You  can also have the grouping go by app or off   so for instance for messages you may want  to have no grouping so every message is   separate or you may want to have it set  to automatic or by app. So that all of   the messages notifications are grouped together  and it will never take up more than one spot. Now focus is the new feature in Monterey  that allows you to set do not disturb mode.   So you've got your default do not disturb  mode. But you can also create other ones   and those can allow notifications from  various contacts and you can set options   for those notifications. You can also allow  notifications from specific apps and then   you can easily switch between these modes. So  instead of having do not disturb on or off you   now have various modes. You can use control center  to easily switch the focus modes to what you want. If you're using a trackpad and most mac  users are because they have macbooks with   the trackpad built in then there are a lot of  cool tips here inside of trackpad settings.   So for under point and click you  can have lookup and data detectors.   That's when there's an address or a phone  number in some text and you could just tap   with three fingers or force click with one  finger to bring that up secondary click   is like the right click that brings up the context  menu. And you can set exactly how that works.   So you can have clicking at the bottom  right hand corner be the way to bring that. Up you can also set tap to click this means that  instead of actually having to press down on the   trackpad just to tap on the surface will be the  same as a click. And if you don't like the sound   the trackpad makes you can turn on silent  clicking and it will make any sound at all.   Under more gestures you can set other things.  For instance notification center can be set   when you swipe left from the right edge of  the trackpad. That's not the right edge of   the screen that's the right edge of the trackpad  and notification center comes up and you can do   the opposite movement to dismiss it. You can  have mission control set to be a trackpad   gesture where you can swipe up with three or four  fingers. You can also have a launch pad brought up   when you pinch with a thumb and three fingers. So  check out all of these options and try them out. The mouse has fewer gestures but you can change  the side for the right click. And you can under   more gestures choose whether or not you can swipe  between pages with the surface of the magic mouse   or swipe between full screen apps.  And a way to bring up mission control   using a double tap with two fingers. So for the keyboard you can determine how  those f keys at the top work. For instance   with this checkbox turned off they work as  standard function keys. So with this turned   off the f1 key is actually the f1 key. If the  app you're using has a keyboard shortcut for f1   it will work just by pressing that key. On  the other hand if you want to do things like   volume or brightness controls you have to hold the  fn or globe key on your mac for that to happen.   If you turn this checkbox on it reverses how that  works. You can also have the fn key do something   when you press it just by itself for instance  it could change the input source it could show   the emoji and symbols viewer there or it could  start dictation that would be pressing it twice. By the way there are a few easy ways  to get to certain System Preferences   if you have System Preferences in your dock  you can press and hold and jump right to one   of the System Preferences. If you're in System  Preferences and you're not sure where something is   just search for it and then when you find  it it will take you right to that section.   And here you can also click and hold this button  right here to bring up an alphabetical list   or you can change to sort  everything alphabetically. To take a screenshot on your mac first check the  System Preferences for the keyboard shortcuts. By   default they are set up as 3 4 and 5 using shift  command or control shift command. However the one   keyboard shortcut that rules them all is shift  command 5. That gives you access to everything   so when you shift command 5 it will bring up this  control here that you can move around. And you can   decide whether to capture the entire screen  selected window a portion of the screen you   can record as a video the entire screen or portion  of the screen as well. You also have options here   like being able to capture the mouse or where  it gets saved. So if you choose a destination   like the desktop and you also have show floating  thumbnail turned on then when you capture you'll   see a thumbnail there. Click that and now you  can mark up the screenshot various different   ways drawing lines on it adding things like  arrows and text and even cropping the image all   before you're done with it and it's saved or you  share it out in some way like directly to email. Mission control is a great way to use the  space on your screen if you have a mac with   just one display. So you can use control  and up arrow to get into mission control   and here you can see the different spaces listed  at the top and you can add a new space it's a   second desktop. So I can be on desktop one and I  can launch an app like say Safari and I can then   use control up arrow and I can see Safari is here  on this one desktop. But I could also move it over   to this other desktop. And I can move back and  forth between these two with ctrl right arrow   and ctrl left arrow or a trackpad gesture. So  this one could be displaying say my calendar   and I control right arrow over to  this one that's displaying Safari. Anytime you take an app full screen like that   it becomes its own space. So now i've got  desktop one desktop two and a full screen version   of Safari. So now I could switch between these  using control left arrow and control right arrow   or ctrl up arrow to go to mission control  and just select which one I want to jump to. And you can even have two apps together as  something that's called split view. So for   instance here i've got calendar and let's say  we'll open up notes at the same time. I can   go to the green button here and you can see I can  enter full screen or I could tile to the left side   then select calendar for the right side. Now  if I go into mission control you can see i've   got desktop 1 and desktop 2. In between those  i've got the split view of notes and calendar   and there's Safari. And by the way you can drag  and drop these to put them in any order that you   want. And if you were to close one then those  windows will return to where they were before. So here are a bunch of miscellaneous tips. The  top part of any window whether it's the Finder   or in an app is called the toolbar and these  buttons here can be customized. First you may   want to customize how they appear whether they  appear as icons as text or both. If you control   click on the toolbar you can choose to have icon  and text text only or the default icon only. And   notice here there's also customize toolbar and  now you could add all of these additional buttons   to the toolbar. So for instance if you want  to have a trash button here you can add it.   You can also remove it just by dragging  it down while you're in this mode.   Different apps are going to have different things  here. Some will have very little that you can add   others will have tons of additional  functions that can be added to the toolbar.   You can always drag this set here  to reset everything to the default. The Finder toolbar has some additional  functionality because you can also drag   and drop folders to it. So let's drag this  folder here nothing will happen normally.   But if I hold the command key down and then  drag i'll be able to add it there so now I   have a folder. And I could instantly access  that folder by clicking there. I could also   drag and drop things into that folder. To get rid  of it just command click and drag away. You can   also drag and drop a file there for easy access.  Just remember to hold the command key first   and drag the file there. So now I can instantly  open up that file by just clicking there. Files can also be dragged and dropped to  favorites over here. But you have to be careful   because it wants to drop them into  one of these folders. But if you hold   the command key down you can see how  you can drag them in between folders   and add a file there. And that also  gives you easy access to open that file. And here's my final tip and it has to do  with using undo which is found in edit undo   or command z. Of course when you're working in a  word processing document or editing an image you   can use command z to undo the last action. But you  can also do it in the Finder. So for instance let   me move this file there and let's say I want to  undo that. I just do command z and it puts it back   and you could do multiple undos. So I can move a  bunch of stuff around I can maybe delete a file.   I can rename something.   And now I can just command z command z command z  a bunch of times to get all of that stuff back. Hope you found some of these  tips useful. Thanks for watching. If you liked this video click the  thumbs up button below to let me know.   I publish new tutorials each weekday hit  the subscribe button so you don't miss out.

Channel: macmostvideo

Views: 19,734

Keywords: mac tips, mac tips and tricks, mac os tricks, mac tricks, hidden mac features, macbook pro tips, mac basics, mac getting started, imac tips, mac guide, macos guide, best mac tips, macos tricks, mac tips for beginners, mac tips and tricks for beginners, best mac tips and tricks, little mac tips and tricks

Id: cnfBR8mugfE

Length: 57min 47sec (3467 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 07 2021