10 Mac Tips And Tricks For College Students

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are some tips for using your Mac in College.

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So if you're in college and you have a Mac you're probably using your Mac for all sorts of things from taking notes, doing assignments, and doing research. Here's some tips that will make is safer and easier to use your Mac while in college.

So in college it's hard to backup your Mac. You're probably using your Mac in student housing and you probably don't have a Time Machine backup. You're probably not connected to your own WiFi Network but the school's WiFi network. So doing a regular backup is tough. But what happens if you loose your Mac or it gets stolen or something happens to it. You loose all your data you have on your Mac. This could be all your class notes, your assignments, everything. So if you can't do a normal backup the next best thing is to store all your documents in the Cloud. 

So iIn System Preferences if you go to your Apple ID you'll see iCloud here on the left. Make sure you're using iCloud Drive. Under options make sure you have Desktop & Documents Folders turned ON. This means that all your files stored in those two folders will be saved to iCloud. If you're Mac goes missing all you need to do when you get a new Mac is to sign in to your iCloud account and all your documents will reappear. Not only that you can also go to any other computer, go to iCloud.com, login and you will find all of your files there. 

When you Delete files from the Documents or Desktop folders then you'll be able to retrieve them at iCloud.com in the Deleted File section for 30 days so it protects you if you accidentally delete something as well. It's not as good as using Time Machine or some online backup service but it's way, way better than having your files just stored locally on your Mac and having that one point of failure, just one mistake away from loosing all of your files.

As a bonus when you store your files in iCloud you could also access them on your iPhone or iPad. So you can go on your iPhone to your Files app and in there see the same Desktop and Documents folders and all your files there. So if you want to review your notes that you saved in a file to iCloud while you're away from your Mac you can just pull out your iPhone and go in the Files app and find that file. You can even make changes and work with them using apps like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote on your iPhone just like you can on your Mac.

Now you can use the Calendar app to keep track of your schedule as well as meetings, due dates, and things like that. So it's easy to create an event in here. You can double click on a date and fill in all the details. But you can also use the Plus button here and just tell it what you want the event to be called and then at and then a time. That's enough to get it on your calendar and you can make adjustments from there. You could also add your class schedule to this bit by bit. So you can enter something like that and that will add it here. Then you can simply hold the Option key down and drag it to other days as well. You could also go in here and click on the date there and select Repeat. You could say Custom and then here set it to repeat on different dates. Say you could do Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Every Week. Frequency Weekly. Hit OK and you'll see it repeat like that. Then go into where you want it to stop, say right here, Delete that one and then Delete All Future Events. Now you can see I've quickly and easily added that class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 9:00 a.m. to my calendar. If I know there's a certain day where class won't be held I can just delete that and say delete only this event. So I could pretty easily, within a few minutes, populate my calendar with my entire class schedule for the semester.

Now you probably want to take notes on your Mac. You could use many different apps to do that. Some in the Mac App Store are dedicated to note taking. If you want to use Pages to do it you could do it there as well. Under Basic there's a Note Taking Template. You can go into that and you're in Outline Mode here. So you could automatically take notes in an Outline Mode. You could also simply go and use a blank Pages document and enter your notes in any way you want.

Your Mac also has a Voice Memos app. You can use this to record a lecture or class. You can even dictate your own notes in here to yourself. The great thing is that this will sync over iCloud as well. So you can actually use the Voice Memos app on your iPhone to record and then the recording will show up in Voice Memos on your Mac and vice versa.

Now Pages isn't the only app with an outline mode. If you go into Keynote, which you would think is really just for making presentations, you can also do an outline mode in there as well. I'm going to use a Basic white theme here and I can switch the view to Outline. Then I can enter notes here in the left and tab in and tab out with Tab and Shift Tab. What this does is it will create slides for the top level here and then items for each of the levels under it. You end up here with two different slides like this. It takes a little practice to get used to but you could do that and even switch to light table mode which shows you your slides on a table like this. You could basically use these as digital index cards. Put what you want on different slides, moving them around and rearranging them that could help you study for tests.

You probably get a lot of web links or notes and a syllabus for each class. Sometimes you may get these as PDF files and you could save them and have them on your local drive. Other times they may be web pages. A quick search for me turned up this sample syllabus here. It's a regular web page here. But what if I want to save a copy of it. A handy thing to do is go to File and Export as PDF from Safari. You can then export this as a PDF file and put it with your class notes. So now you don't have to go to web to this page to see the syllabus again.

From any app that you work in, even if there's no Export as PDF function you could always go to Print and then PDF, Save as PDF, to save anything as a PDF that can be printed.

Now a really cool thing that you could do using both your Mac and your iPhone is to use your iPhone camera as a scanner. You can do this on your Mac by using this Continuity feature. Just Control click in any Finder window here and you have Import options. You'll be able to take a photo using your iPhone or scan documents using your iPhone. When you scan a document, rather than taking a photo, it will create a smaller file and it will kind of flatten out the page of it. So if there are a few pages from a book in the library that you want to get a copy of you can scan them like this and now you have a PDF of that document and you can save it with your course notes.

Now I have two security tips. You should take security very seriously since you'll be carrying your Mac all around campus and it could easily get lost or stolen. One of the things that you want to do is you want to make sure that in your iCloud settings, so in here under iCloud you have Find My Mac turned On. Turn that on and if your Mac gets lost not only can you find it using say your iPhone's Find My App, but you can also do things like disable it.

But in addition to that almost every university has a way for you to register your Mac. You can usually do that on the university's site. Then you can register your Mac's serial number with your school so if it gets stolen but then recovered by the school they know how to get it back to you.

Finally one of the things you may want to do is Share files with other students. Now file sharing can be difficult. You have to be on the same network. You have to enable File Sharing. There are permissions involved and all of that. But for just sharing simple files you don't need to do anything. You could just use AirDrop. Using AirDrop allows you to send a file very easily to somebody else either with a Mac or an iPhone and they could save that file. So you could share notes or share an important document from a class that you have with another classmate. You can always send something with AirDrop by simply Control clicking on a file and then choosing Share then AirDrop. A list of iPhones and Macs that are near you should appear here if they have Air Drop enabled for Everybody or For Contacts Only but you're one of their contacts.Then you could just send them that file and then they receive it. No need to setup complex file sharing or anything for that. It just works.

If you're using your Mac while in college I would love to hear what tips you have for other students as well. Leave them in the comments below.