Mac Tutorial for Beginners - Switching from Windows to macOS

hello everyone i'm anson alexander and welcome to my updated guide to switching from pc to mac this is going to serve as a beginner tutorial for new mac users i'm going to frame things from the perspective of a pc user but you should find this tutorial helpful even if this is the first time that you've ever used a computer so when you first log into your mac computer you're located on the desktop and that's where we are right now this is actually a new user account so it should look pretty similar to what you're working with because i haven't customized anything about this account now this desktop functions just like a desktop on a windows computer so we can put files and folders on here and move them around and organize things how we'd like and we're going to do that a little bit later but the first thing i want to talk about is actually this menu up here at the top left and it's called the apple menu you can access it by clicking on this little apple icon in the top left of your computer there's some really important locations that we can access from within the apple menu the first one is the system preferences this is where we can change all of the settings on our computer so this is equivalent to going to the control panel in windows and i recommend that once you finish this tutorial that you definitely go into your system preferences and just have a look around at all the different options you have to customize your mac you know don't be afraid of really breaking anything go in there and play around a little bit it's also important to note that this is where you can put your computer to sleep restart it or shut it down so you're going to be accessing the apple menu quite a bit it's a good idea to remember where it's located so if we just quickly click to take a look at our system preferences you'll see what i was talking about when i mentioned that there's all the different areas that you can customize within your computer so you can customize you know your screen saver that's right here you can modify your internet connection if you need to down here with a network setting connect any bluetooth devices with the bluetooth setting you can customize your displays so if you're using multiple displays again a number of different options now once we're done looking at system preferences to close this window we can go at the very top left and we can click on this red x to close the window that's equivalent to hitting the x on a windows computer the next thing that i want to mention is called spotlight and it's located at the top right of our computer and it looks like a magnifying glass so if i click on this magnifying glass you'll see that i've now opened up spotlight and spotlight allows us to search our entire computer for anything so we can search for files folders applications anything that we have on our computer so if i were to search for an application called safari you'll notice that it now pops up in the list safari is actually apple's equivalent to internet explorer it's the web browser developed by apple that you can use to go to websites and access your email and all that sort of good stuff and we'll take a look at that later on but as you can see instead of going to the applications folder and accessing safari i could just go up to spotlight and search for safari now for those of you who like computer shortcuts if you hit the command button which looks like an infinity knot on your keyboard and then the spacebar you'll bring up spotlight so you don't actually have to go click on the magnifying glass command spacebar brings it up so always remember if you can't find something on your computer you can always search for it and hopefully you'll be able to find it that way now i also want to talk about the bottom toolbar here on our apple computer so that's at the very bottom of our screen you can see that we have a number of icons already on there these are the default applications that come pre-installed on your mac computer if you mouse over any of these applications they'll say what they are so we can see that here's the apple music app we have our calendar app right here contacts your photos app maps messages hey facetime that's an important one right then of course we have safari as well and you've got your mail app so you can set up different mail accounts i personally still use gmail as some of you may know if you've seen my other tutorials so i access my email through safari but i could have gmail set up with the mail app i just prefer to access it through a browser but that's up to you it's important to note that you can also change the settings on how this toolbar is displayed in your system preferences so we can go up here to the apple menu click on system preferences and then click on dock and from here we could click automatically hide and show the dock which means that it now disappears until we mouse over it which is usually how i like to have my computer configured so i'm going to leave that like that for now i also want to mention the apple app store so if we go up to the apple menu here you'll notice that we had this option to go to the app store and if we click on that it'll open up and it tells us hey there's some new stuff okay that's great now i probably shouldn't have minimized this toolbar but if you look down here in our toolbar when we mouse over it you'll now see that the app store icon is on our toolbar and there's a little dot below it which means that app is currently running now it's also a good idea to mention that you can right click on your apps in your toolbar and you have some options so you could quit the app from here you could show all windows from here if you've moved a window off your desktop and you can't find it so when in doubt on a mac computer just like on a windows computer always right click and if your right click isn't working you might have to go up here to the apple menu go into system preferences again i mentioned you're going to be in here a lot and then go over to the track pad and mouse section so if you're using a mouse you can click on mouse and depending on your mouse you might have to enable a right click in here if it's not working okay back to the app store so here we are in the app store and this is where you can find a whole bunch of different applications that you can install on your mac computer i definitely recommend that you look through this on your own time but just to get started you could go over here to the categories section and then from the categories section you could click on a category that may interest you so you might want to look at some utilities that you can install for your mac computer we've got password manager clipboard manager all sorts of good stuff in here so these are applications that have been approved by apple so you can feel pretty safe that these aren't going to harm your computer whereas if you download applications from the internet there's a chance that they could have a virus just like on a windows computer now before we close this window and take a look at another area within our computer i want to talk about quitting applications because you'll notice that since i'm in the app store up here at the very top left it now says app store that means i'm in this application and if i click on this menu i have a lot of different options this is where i can access my app store preferences and this is pretty much the same for any app on mac computers when you're in the app you can click on this drop down menu and access preferences to modify any settings for that particular application this is also where we can quit the app store i think this is also a good time to mention that apple has an equivalent suite of applications to microsoft office and they are apple pages numbers and keynote apple pages is equivalent to microsoft word apple numbers is equivalent to microsoft excel and keynote is equivalent to powerpoint so you could go ahead and you could search for those here in the app store they might be right in the discover section here at the beginning let's scroll down see if we can find them in here yeah here they are so we've got pages keynote and numbers and you can see that they're free and they're listed here in the top three apps and games for mac so definitely a good idea to take a look at those on your own time okay let's go ahead and let's quit out of the app store okay so now i want to talk about something called finder on mac computers and it's equivalent to windows explorer so to access finder we can go to our bottom toolbar which is now minimized by default and we can click on this little smiley face guy you'll notice that it does have a dot beneath it that's because finder is currently running finder is always running if finder wasn't running we wouldn't be able to see anything on our screen again it's equivalent to windows explorer so let's click to open up finder you'll notice that a window now opens up on my computer and this is where we can access all of the files and folders on our computer so you'll notice that i have a list of locations over here on the left side of my screen so this is where we can access some different areas within our computer such as the applications folder now i do have some additional applications installed on my computer although this is a new user account in the applications folder it shows all the applications so this includes applications that are on my personal account so that's why that might look a little bit different from your computer but this is where any applications that you've installed should be located you can see at the top here i have keynote pages and numbers installed now if i couldn't find one of these applications in the folder i could always search for in spotlight right but generally speaking you can come in here to the applications folder and you could double click to open up an application such as pages okay so we would enter into pages and we're not going to do that right now so i'm going to go up here to this menu and i'm going to quit out of pages let's go ahead and let's take a look at some of these other locations first of all we have a documents folder and this is just a folder that is created for us by default on our computer for us to store our documents you'll notice that i've already put an image in there that we're going to take a look at in a second we also have the downloads folder and this is where any downloads will automatically go when you download something from the internet so if you can't find something you've downloaded go ahead and take a look in here i think this is a good time to mention that at any point when we're on our mac computer whether we're in an application such as chrome or safari or we're just in finder here we can always resize our windows by going to the corners or the sides and just dragging them out okay so let's talk about storing files on our computer and let's create a folder so we're going to go over here to the documents folder and yeah i have this image in here but first let's talk about creating a folder i think the easiest way to create a folder is just by right clicking which you can also do on a windows computer so if i right click here in the documents folder you'll notice that i have a list of a number of options that i can do and i just want to create a new folder so i can just call this test folder and then i can click outside of it to kind of finish it and now i've got this folder that i could double click to access inside of it and i could hit this back button up here at the top left to go back and i could click and drag this image and drop it in the test folder just like on a windows computer so now my image is in there i could take this image and i could drop it on my desktop i mentioned that we can put files and folders on our desktop so we could go to our documents folder and we could put our test folder on the desktop we could drop our image into our test folder and then move our test folder back to documents we can move things anywhere on mac right so that's kind of how you can play with folders and files if you want to rename a folder you can click on it once and then click on it a second time but not quickly right on the name and then i can you know rename this just to folder or something like that again always important to remember that when right clicking on mac you get a number of different options so look at how many options we have here when we right click on this folder and there's actually one that's pretty important that i want to talk about and that's the second option that's moved to trash so this is one way to delete items on a mac computer is to right click on them and then click move to trash you'll notice that it now disappears to access my trash i can go down to the toolbar and i can go all the way to the right to this little trashcan looking icon you'll notice that now it has some trash in it earlier it didn't it's because we've actually deleted something but i could click to open up my trash you'll notice that from within my trash i could hit this empty button which is basically permanently deleting my file so i want to be careful about that or i could go over here to this particular file and i could right click on it and i could delete it immediately from here or i could put it back take it out of my trash and here we are back in the documents folder and my folder that i created is in here as well again at any time when you are navigating through your computer using finder you can change your views up here at the top and i actually do this quite often so right now we're in the icon view we could take a look at a list view which is kind of similar to how you would look at certain files in windows and here we have some more information so we have the date modified the size and the kind of file that it is we could also look at this family tree view family hierarchy view so we can see here is my folder here's what's inside my folder if i had another folder in here i would see what's inside of that over here then we can also look at gallery view which is nice when you're looking at a folder with a bunch of images speaking of images i do want to show you a pretty cool feature here on mac so right now i'm in my folder that i created i can see up here at the top and we have the image that i added before i started this video now let's say i didn't want to actually open up this image but i just wanted to kind of preview it if i click once to select it i can then hit the space bar you'll notice the preview of this image pops up on my computer pretty cool right if i had multiple images in here i could actually and it's really pixelated i'm sorry about that it's not a very high quality image but if i had multiple pictures in this folder i could actually use my arrow keys to just mouse through and preview all of them so that's a nice little feature that i wanted to mention and before we move on and customize a few things on our computer i just want to go over the other little buttons that we have up here at the top so we talked about the red x that would close this window the yellow button is the minimize button so if i click that you'll notice that that folder goes route and it gets sent down here to my toolbar so here it is now called folder if i click on it it disappears from my toolbar and it opens up on my screen so that's the minimize button and then the green button offers a few different options we can enter full screen by mousing over and then clicking on enter full screen then to exit that we can go up here to the top and we can click on the green button again so those are just some useful ways to resize windows and navigate when using your mac now let's talk about customizing a few things on our mac computer so what we're going to do is we're going to make sure that we're in finder so to do that i'm actually just going to move this window over and you can just make sure you just click anywhere on your desktop and make sure it says finder up here at the top while we're in finder we're going to click on this finder menu and we're going to click on preferences okay so now i have my finder preferences pulled up and i want to customize a few things here let me move this again first thing i want to do is i want to check this hard disks button what that does is it puts this hard drive icon on my desktop and now i can double click on my hard drive to easily access all the files on my computer i just like having it there it's how mac used to be by default maybe i'm just old school but if you'd like that on your desktop that's how you can enable that and then the other thing that i want to show you is if we go over here to sidebar you'll notice that there are some areas in our computer that are currently unchecked which means when we open up a finder window such as this one we're not seeing them over here in the left but if i click on movies music pictures and this last folder which is called my home folder you'll notice that they appear now in a finder window so these are just folders created by apple by default that you can store movies music and pictures in and then this final location is as i mentioned your home folder so if we click on that you'll notice that this area has all of our personal documents so this is where our documents are located our downloads our movies music and pictures that's the folder that all of those folders are inside of so if you kind of get lost on your computer anytime just go ahead and open up finder and then open up your home folder so you can access all of your files and if you're looking for an application then you need to go to applications but between your home folder and applications you should be able to find almost anything on your computer okay to finish things up i do want to talk about safari a little bit because one of the primary things that we do on a computer nowadays is surf the internet so i'm going to close out these windows and now i'm going to go down to my toolbar and i'm going to click just once on safari now it kind of came up weird because we had it open earlier but i now have safari open and i'm just going to drag to maximize this window now safari works just like google chrome or internet explorer up here at the top we could enter a website to go to so i could go to ansonalex.com or alternatively i could just search google so i could just search for anson alexander enter that and it will search google so just like a number of other browsers this is where you can access your email you could go right up here to the top and you could enter you know gmail.com and then sign into your gmail account it features bookmarks just like in other browsers so we could click to access the bookmarks menu and we could add this page as a bookmark if we wanted to then when we're done using safari you can always just go to safari and quit but remember that you can also use this minimize button to send it to your toolbar if you want to find a file on your desktop and then you go to your toolbar and click to open it back up again okay so that's pretty much all i have for you for this beginner tutorial on using mac i hope that at this point you're familiar with kind of where everything is located on your computer that you're able to go into your system preferences and modify some settings that you're able to create some folders so you can start organizing your files and that you can access safari so that you can navigate to all the websites that you're used to using on pc or whatever computer environment you're coming from if any of you have suggestions for future videos please let me know in the comments section i really hope you enjoyed this video here on youtube if you did i would really appreciate a thumbs up and if you want to see more technology tips and tutorials don't forget to subscribe to my youtube channel that's all i have for you for now this is anson from ansonalex.com

Channel: Anson Alexander

Views: 1,380,674

Keywords: Apple, Mac, macOS, beginners, tutorial, guide, finder, safari, apple menu, spotlight, seniors, Windows

Id: 67keaaWOKzE

Length: 16min 29sec (989 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Zpointe]

Video editing has gotten legit. Apple always find a way to subtly leak their stuff.

[u/phjils]

There’s a school of thought that the new design has been sat on a shelf since 2016, waiting for a chipset small and cool-running enough to support it, or that may be BS. 🤷‍♂️

[u/wonderfuffin]

Come on, really. It’s just an artistic representation of the iMac.