10 Actually Useful Things You Can Do With the MacBook Pro Touch Bar

The MacBook Pro Touch Bar can be a useful productivity tool if you take the time to train yourself to use it. The first steps are to learn what it is capable of and how to customize it.

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Video Transcript: 
Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at ten ways to use the Touch Bar on your MacBook Pro. 
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So some people really love the Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro. Others don't find it very useful. It's been around now for more than four years but I think a lot of people haven't taken the time to train themselves to use it. Therefore it hasn't become a useful productivity tool for them. So here are ten things you can do with the Touch Bar without installing any additional software.
Let's start with something simple. When you're editing text, say in an app like Pages, you can use the Touch Bar to style text. So you can see here as I'm typing I have suggestions as to what the next word could be. But if I select text then you can see the Touch Bar changes and now I've got the ability to easily style text say by making it Bold or Justifying the text or setting a bullet list style. I can also tap here and then change its style using one of the styles that I've setup for this document. You could also tap here and then select a color. You have basic colors but you could dig down and actually go to some really good color tools like for instance RGB here and set red, green, and blue colors using sliders and even the opacity. Now when you don't have text selected, like you're just typing normally, you won't see it here. But if you close the suggestions it actually reveals all this. So you could actually tap and then type something and it will use that style there. Just like using the regular keyboard shortcut or selecting the styles in the right sidebar. How this can be really useful in Pages is that you can get rid of the sidebar for most things. Whereas you may have had this opened in the past you can close it and just concentrate on your writing and then use the Touch Bar to do some styling. You can see this works in other apps as well. Here you can see I have the same controls in Mail and here they are in TextEdit in Rich Text Mode. It's also available in the Notes app but you have even more things here. Like, for instance, the ability to add checkboxes there, the ability to dig into the styles in Notes, you can Indent and Outdent, and you can use the regular styes as well. It will even work in a lot of third party apps like for instance Microsoft Word.
Now you may also notice here in Mail there's also a button for emoji. So you can use this to browse emoji and special characters without having to bring up the special controls that will overlay part of the screen. So I can see my recent ones here. I can go in and jump to any category and then I can tap and drag to scroll through them and pick an emoji that I want to use. This, of course, is even more useful in Messages. So you can see the emoji and special character chooser there.
Now let's go into System Preferences. This is where you can customize the Touch Bar. So I'm going to go to Keyboard and then under the Keyboard heading here I've got Touch Bar Shows and normally you would have it set to App Controls with Show Control Strip. So you could turn off Control Strip on the right so you have all this space for App Controls. You can also decide to have something else besides App Controls there like the Expanded Control Strip so it acts just like the top row of keys on a regular keyboard. You can also have it show, by default, the F keys. But a really useful thing to do if you use a lot of virtual desktops is Spaces. So now you actually see your spaces there. Here I've got two desktops and Safari in full screen and you could see how I can easily switch between these using the Touch Bar. These will stay there so I can continue to use them. So if you're not using Touch Bar for anything else but you use a lot of virtual desktops set it to this and have it be the way that you access all of the different desktops.
Now when you go to the Expanded Control Strips setting you get things that look a lot like the keys on a regular Mac keyboard. But you may actually not use these very often. For instance I don't adjust the Brightness of the keyboard or the screen that often and I don't use the Music playback controls here. But there are a lot of other things that you can put here. You can completely customize it. So I'm going to go to Customize Control Strip and now I can drag a whole different set of things there. First, let's get rid of some things. So I'm going to tap here in Brightness and drag it to the Trash. Same thing with Keyboard Brightness and same thing with the Music Controls. Now let's go and add some things that I actually can find useful. So, for instance, I can drag in Spotlight and put it here on the right. I can drag in Do Not Disturb. Let's move that over here a bit. I can put in Night Shift. Maybe I take a lot of Screenshots and I can put those in there too. Let's put Notification Center. Maybe put that all the way over here on the right. So I could put the buttons that I use the most. Even a Screen Lock or a Sleep button could be really useful depending upon which things you use a lot. So you can customize this to be actual controls that you actually use and arrange them as you like instead of just sticking with the default set. If you ever want to get back to the defaults just drag this default set here down and it will reset everything.
Now one of the things you may have seen there, when you go to Customize the Control Strip, is Quick Actions. Let's add that in here. I'm going to stick it here and let's get rid of Keyboard Brightness to make room. So before I use that I need to create some Quick Actions. So you can create those in Automator. So let's go into Automator here and let's do a New Document and I'm going to set it up as a Quick Action and I'm going to make a very simple Quick Action. I'm going to set it to No Input In Any Application and then I'm going to choose an icon here. So let's choose maybe this little Briefcase here and setup a color. I'm going to do Launch and look for Launch Application and drag that over. I can set this to launch any application I want. Like let's say, as an example, Calculator. Then I will Save this Quick Action as Calculator. Now let's Close that and let's create a new one. Let's also make it a Quick Action and let's set it to No Input In Any Application and let's, for an icon, choose a Compose icon there and set it to some other color like green. I'm going to Search for New Mail and use a New Mail message here. I'm going to leave all this stuff blank. Then I'm going to Save and call it New Email. Now I'm going to Quit Automator. Since I saved those things as Quick Actions you should see them here in any application menu under Services. You could see under General you could see those two new things. But you also see them in the Touch Bar when I tap on Quick Actions it goes to those two. So now I can launch Calculator or I could Compose a new email which will open up the Mail app, if it's not already opened, and start a new message. I didn't put anything in those blank spaces so it didn't stick anything in there but I could have actually prepopulated it with something in the subject line or who it's to or something.
So in Automator you can continue to create simple Quick Actions like launching apps and then it will add them when you tap here to see Quick Actions. Now this could be even more useful if you actually have it show the Quick Actions by default. So you go and change Touch Bar Shows to Quick Actions and you could see those things are now there by default. I could add a whole bunch of them, scroll through them, and basically create controls that launch apps, do all sorts of things, and that's what is now in the Touch Bar. You don't need a third party app to do stuff like this. You can do it with Automator and setting your Touch Bar to Quick Actions. Do note though that setting your Touch Bar to Showing Quick Actions seems a little bit buggy. I wasn't able to get it to work until after a Restart and I'm still not able to get it to work on another machine and I've seen a few other people report the same thing.
Now let's switch back to using App Controls and let's launch Keynote and bring up a Presentation. Now I don't see plenty of useful controls here as you select different elements. For instance I can select this text box here and then play around with its opacity, colors, things like that. But when you actually go to Play your presentation then the Touch Bar changes to a way to navigate through the slides. So I could jump around to different slides by tapping in the Touch Bar. Safari also has some really interesting controls. Here you could see I could tap to Enter a website name. But when I tap there it actually shows me My Favorites. So I can jump even down into Folders there to go to Favorites or go to a specific website. I can even create a new Tab using the Touch Bar.
When you're playing back video in various apps like QuickTime Player here you get a Play control that will change to Pause. But you also get the ability to tap and drag the Playback Head around to pick a time in the video. This is also true when you're viewing web videos. So here I am at YouTube.com viewing a video and I have Playback controls here at the bottom. I can also move around in the video itself inside the YouTube page. It works on a lot of other sites as well.
So here's a fun one that I saved for last. In GarageBand you can use the Touch Bar as a keyboard. By that I mean as a musical keyboard. So here I've just created a new document and I've just set the software instrument to just a piano. Now I have various controls here in the Touch Bar. But if I tap this first item here to switch to a different type of control you can see one of the items I can choose is a little keyboard. When I do that it changes the Touch Bar to a keyboard. Now I can actually play. It just works if I drag my finger across it. You could go Up and Down octaves. You can go to Scale and then pick a scale to use. So, for instance, we can choose Major Blues instead of just a regular keyboard. Then I could even change the key. So while it's not really something that you're going to play like a regular musical instrument if you're messing around with a melody it could be easier to use this than to use the keys on the keyboard plus you leave your keys on your keyboard for other shortcuts.
So these are just ten examples of what you can do with the Touch Bar. What you need to do is look at the Touch Bar when you're using different apps that you use and see what's there. See how it can be customized. For instance in the Mail app here, if I go to View, there's Customize Touch Bar. I could change what appears in the Touch Bar for Mail. Here's the same thing in Safari. If I go to View and Customize Touch Bar in Safari there are different controls that I can then add to the Touch Bar like a Home button, History, AutoFill, Open and Close the Sidebar. Things like that. If you take a few minutes to learn how to use the Touch Bar and customize it for the apps you use it can then increase your productivity in the long term. If you don't find any App Controls useful you could at least set it to show your different desktops or perhaps show custom Quick Actions so you can get some use out of the Touch Bar.

Comments: 8 Responses to “10 Actually Useful Things You Can Do With the MacBook Pro Touch Bar”

Steve Whitley

4 years ago

Thanks, Gary - until now I actually thought that the Touch Bar was an expensive waste of time and technology. I will now try some of these tips and tricks that are useful to me.

Travis Braithwaite

Quite useful. I had no idea there was that much functionality.

My issue is not the content of the Touch Bar, but the location of it. I am a touch typist, and I don't look at my keys at all for the most part. So to even see what is on the Touch Bar, I have to take my eyes off the screen, which I am not in the habit of.

Guess I just need to adapt.

Nicholas Paul

Hi Gary. I always thought the touch bar was kinda of gee whiz option but as you pointed out it has some very useful aspects and am motivated to give them a try.
thanks Enjoy your daily tips

Kay Fisher

We just got a new macbook pro M1 but... I do 99% work on my iMac pro. I’ve tried using my ipad on the side with sidecar and touch bar but it was really buggy and unusable. What I would like is a mac app that would put a pseudo touchbar on the bottom of my screen above the dock and allow me to touch it with mouse clicks. Does such an app exist?

Gary Rosenzweig

Kay: Indeed it does. I used it to make this video. https://redsweater.com/touche/

John Scully

Best explanation of how to use the Touchbar I've come across.

Glen Fisher

Why is it that when I tap emojis on the Touch Bar sometimes it takes 5-6 taps before they are attached. Especially the note keys.

Glen: Sorry, I don't know. Seems to work with one tap for me.

Comments Closed.

10 Actually Useful Things You Can Do With the MacBook Pro Touch Bar

Comments: 8 Responses to “10 Actually Useful Things You Can Do With the MacBook Pro Touch Bar”

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