Mac Video Tutorials and Tips for Apple Users

Wi-Fi is a made-up term that refers to the way we connect wirelessly to our networks and the Internet beyond. People use a variety of terms to describe Wi-Fi Base Stations, but each has a subtly different meaning.

Tags are useful for many things. One idea is to use them to flag files to gather them together for a single use without moving the files from the folders where they reside. For instance, you may want to gather together files to send to someone or save a copy to an archive.

The Predictive Text feature in iOS helps you save taps by trying to predict the next work you want to type and giving you a button to type it with one tap. Predictive text will show you suggestions based on context so sometimes it will seem like magic as it guesses what you want to write before you know. With some practice it can save time and frustration when typing on your small iPhone screen.

A new feature in Pages allows you to create color, gradient or image backgrounds in Page Layout documents. You can stretch or tile images across the page. You can also tint the image to fit your needs.

If you are using a third-party email address as your Apple ID, you may need to change it if you are losing that email address or plan to move on to another email service. Apple has a page that spells out the steps needed to change which email address is used as your Apple ID.

People often use the term Virus when what they really should be saying is Malware. A computer virus is a very dangerous type of malware that can spread from computer to computer on its own. Malware is a more general term that can be correctly used to describe viruses, trojan horses, adware, spyware and more. It is better to use the term Malware unless you know for a fact that the problem is a virus.

There are many settings on a Mac that determine how the Dock appears. You can change the size, hide it when not needed, and even move it to the left or right sides of the screen. You can change these settings in System Preferences, or by Control+clicking on the divider line in the Dock.

The iPhone and iPad have a built-in dictionary that doesn't appear as an individual app, but as a resource you can access Safari, text editing and other apps. You can look up any work you have selected. You can also look up words directly and quickly narrow search results to only show the definition. You can customize which dictionaries are used as well.

You can use Preview to combine more than one image into a single image. By using a trick to start a new document, and then resizing, copying and pasting other images into the new document, you can create a collage of images. Then you can export in the format of your choice to use in video projects, online posting, and so on.

You can use the wildcard characters question mark and asterisk in some Numbers functions to get more powerful results. In this example, we'll look at using a SUMIF function that sums rows that match only a portion of a string, rather than an exact match.

People often confuse storage and memory, but they are two different things in your computer and mobile devices. Memory is temporary and helps your device perform complex tasks. Storage is persistent and determines how much data you can keep on your device.

A fairly new feature in Pages, Numbers and Keynote for iOS is the ability to add Smart Annotations. You can draw using the Apple Pencil or your finger and mark up a document. You can delete and move the marks you make. You can also view these on the Mac when you use iCloud to share your documents between devices, but you cannot draw new Smart Annotations.

You can do more with dictation than just typing. You can also indicate when you want text to be bold, italics, or underlined. Some people have trouble because they try to include the command with the text they are typing, but it is important to wait between typing and issuing commands. In Pages you can even access everything in the Format sidebar using dictation commands.

Creating a custom Finder icon for a file or folder is as simple as copy and paste. However, a common problem people experience is when they try to copy and paste a whole file as the new icon and get a generic image icon instead of the picture. The trick is to copy the image inside the file, and not the file itself.

There was a lot more announced at this year’s Apple WWDC than I anticipated. I’ve very excited about a few things in particular.