20 Useful Tips And Tricks For Mac Users

Learn about a variety of Mac tips from usifn the Finder, System Preferences, Safari, working with text and much more.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are twenty tips and tricks for using your Mac. 
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So let's start with the most basic tip. If you want to know the name of your Mac, the exact name of the model, go to the Apple Menu then About This Mac. Then look for this line. It will be a name like MacBook Pro or iMac and then in parentheses a year. Apple likes to put early, mid, or late before the year. This exact line will tell anybody which modelHi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are twenty tips and tricks for using your Mac. 
Now on your Desktop you may be used to seeing hard drives shown here as icons. But they're not really that useful. Very rarely do you need to go to the top level of your hard drive. So to stop your Desktop from showing these go to Finder Preferences. Under General turn off these checkboxes here. Now those items will no longer be represented on your Desktop. But you could still get to them in the Go Menu by going to the Computer Level. Then you'll see them in the Finder like this.
Now when you're looking at files in the Finder you can double click to open one. But if you want to open a file in a specific application just Control Click on it and then choose Open With. It will show you all the applications that can handle that type of file and you could choose which one to open up. The default's at the top but you could choose another one instead.
Now when you have multiple windows open you can click to drag one but it's going to bring it to the top. If you want to keep the window in the layer it is but still move it hold the Command key down and then drag and then the window will stay behind other windows as you move it.
Now this green button here at the top left corner of any window will take you to Full Screen for that window. If you hold the Option key down it will Zoom but that doesn't always make the window fill the space. To actually get it to fill the screen you want to go to any corner, hold the Option key down and double click.
Most of the commands you need to work in whatever app you're using can be found in the various menus in the Menu Bar. But sometimes there are hidden commands. You can reveal those with the Option key. Watch all of the different items in this menu as I press the Option key and hold it down. You could see a few of them change to alternative commands.
If you don't know where a menu command is you can find it using the Help Menu. So, for instance, Format, Font, and then Baseline has superscript. But it's hard to remember that's where it is. So instead just go to Help and type and you'll see the first items here are Menu Items. It will show you where it is. But you could actually just choose this item here instead of going to that menu.
When you want to search for files you may be tempted to use Spotlight. Command Space brings up the Spotlight search bar but this will give you all sorts of results including webpages, email, fonts, all sorts of things. If you know what you want is a file instead in the Finder use Search here or Command F and search for the file in a Finder window. This will only give you files as results.
So the Finder has all sorts of options in View for sorting and grouping your files. But if you go to your Applications folder there's a special grouping option not available in other places. Go to View and then Use Groups and once you do that View Group By and there's one called Application Category. Now all of your apps are organized into different categories.
The most basic way to move files around on your Mac is to Drag and Drop them. So you can drag a file into a folder for instance. But if it's hard to Drag and Drop while you search for the destination you can instead do Command C for Copy and then go to another destination and then do Command V for Paste. That will actually make a copy of that file in the new location. Hold the Option Key down and Option Command V changes to Move. So now I can move that file here without having to Drag and Drop it at all.
Many years ago apps allowed you to choose File, Save As to save a new copy of the current document as a new file. It's not there anymore. You can use Duplicate for something similar. But if you use the Option key like I showed before you'll find that Duplicate changes to Save As. Save As is actually available in almost all apps. You just have to hold the Option key down to access it.
On the Mac you can create a PDF out of almost anything. Any document you're working on in any application or a webpage that you're looking at. If you can Print it you can create a PDF. If you go to File, Print you'll see a PDF button right here. Click on that and you can Save as PDF or sometimes it's easier to Open in Preview and then Save the PDF from Preview if you like what you see.
If you have multiple windows open in an app you can switch between them with a keyboard shortcut. You may know Command Tab switches between apps. But Command and the back tic or Tilde key on American keyboards is just above Tab that will switch between all the windows in the current application.
In System Preferences there's something called Hot Corners. But you won't find it here in the main System Preferences listing. You have to go to Mission Control and then there's a button for it. You can set a corner to do something. So, for instance, you could make the lower right hand corner put the display asleep. So now in order to Sleep you don't even need a keyboard shortcut or anything. You could just move the cursor down to the bottom right hand corner and your Mac will go to Sleep. You could also hold a modifier key down, like say Command, and you would need to do Command and move the cursor to that corner for it to work.
Emoji and Special Characters are fun to use whether you're text messaging, sending email, or just want to have them in a document. You can actually type them anywhere on your Mac really easily. All you need to do is use the keyboard shortcut, Control Command Space, and it brings up this special Character Viewer here and it has Search. So you just type something to search for and it will come up with results. It will make it much easier to find what you want.
You can also Autocomplete on a Mac. This functionality has actually been around for a long time but few people use it. You can start typing a word and then you can simply hit the spacebar to autocomplete what's there. Or, you could use F5 and it will bring up a list of different words that begin with those letters. You may have to hit the fn key and F5 depending upon your settings. In some situations the Escape key will work as well to bring up those choices.
Do you ever accidentally hit the Caps Lock key? There's really no good use for a Caps Lock key today so you might as well disable it. You can do that in System Preferences under Keyboard and then go to Keyboard and then Modifier keys, Caps Lock Key and set it to No Action.
Now if you Copy and Paste on your Mac, whether it's from one of your documents to another document or maybe you're copying and pasting to something from the web. If you paste it in it's going to use the font and styling of whatever it is you copied. If you'd rather use the font and styling that's there in your document notice that if you go to Paste, there's Paste and Match Style right under it. Option Shift Command V. Do that and you could see it kind of throws away the formatting and uses the formatting in the document at that position. That's available in lots of other apps as well. But just check in the Edit Menu to see what it's called and what the keyboard shortcut is.
It's easy to search for information on the web but sometimes you're faced with an entire page of information and the bit that you want is hard to find. There's so much text. You can Search inside of a page with Command F. It brings up this little search field here. You can change it from Contains to Begins With if you want. You can search for something. It will tell you how many matches there are and even let you use the Back and Forward Arrows to go through the page to find all those instances of that text.
Now to Delete a file you can select it and then do File and then Move to Trash or just move it to the trash yourself. It will sit in the Trash until you empty the trash. If you'd rather skip the Trash and Delete it immediately if you go to Move to Trash but hold the Option key down. So Option Command Delete, instead of just Command Delete, it changes to Delete Immediately. The file will skip the Trash and immediately be deleted.
Of course use this with Caution!
So here's a bonus one. See the Time in the upper right hand corner. In Big Sur this acts as a way to turn On and Off Do Not Disturb. You can go to Control Center and use this button here. But if you simply Option Click you can see it gets grayed out. That's an indicator that Do Not Disturb is on. Option Click again and it turns off Do Not Disturb. It's now the regular color so Do Not Disturb is turned Off.
Okay, here's one more bonus one. I often hear people talking about how songs when you play them in the Music App some are louder than others. There's actually a feature that has been around forever that allows you to have all your songs played at approximately the same volume no matter what the recording is like. Just go in the Music App to Music Preferences and from there go to Playback and it's called Sound Check. Turn that on and that will even out the volume levels as you go from song to song.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 6 Responses to “20 Useful Tips And Tricks For Mac Users”

ntb

4 years ago

Thanks for a whole bunch of useful tips! Very helpful. I have a question related to your Tip 9...
In the Finder, when you select the Sort By icon in the menu bar there's a list of options. What's the distinction there between None and Name? I haven't been able to see anything different in these two views.

Gary Rosenzweig

nab: None only appears as an option in Icon View. With Icon View, you can arrange the icons how you like, putting them in any positions in the window. That would be the "None" setting. "Name" would sort them by name and you couldn't place those icons where you want.

nick

hey Gary, I always wondered why, when listing the apps that are suggested to open a specific file type, more often than not there are apps listed than in actual fact do not open that file. Maybe there are some characteristics of that file type that are recognized by an app?

nick: If the app tells macOS that it can open the app, then it will appear in the list. Hard to say more without knowing a specific example.

Barbara

Why do you say there is no use for the caps lock key?

Barbara: I say "no good use." I mean I suppose if you wanted to type something like NASA you could Caps Lock, n, a, s, a, Caps Lock. But is that really better than holding Shift and typing nasa?

Comments Closed.

20 Useful Tips And Tricks For Mac Users

Comments: 6 Responses to “20 Useful Tips And Tricks For Mac Users”

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