21 Useful Mac Tips In 8 Minutes

Here are 21 udeful Mac tips for all levels. Incuded are tips for using the Finder, Safari, Mail, Calendar and more. Even expert Mac users may find something they didn't know or had forgotten.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are 21 useful Mac tips in 8 minutes.
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So let's jump right into the tips. If you want to easily type a long word just type the first few characters and then tap the F5 key. You may need to hold down the fn key depending upon your settings. Then you get a list of words that start with those letters.  You can go and down arrow to the one you want, hit Return, and it's typed for you and spelled correctly. This works in apps like TextEdit, Pages, and even Mail.
If you have a lot of windows opened for an app and you want to jump to one, even one that you might not be able to see because it's hidden by the others, you can click and hold on the item in the Dock. Here you'll see a list of windows that are currently opened and you can select one to go to it. You'll also see a list of recently opened documents. 
If you have a document that when you double click it it always opens in the wrong app you can Control click on it and choose Open With to open it in any app that handles the document. If you hold down the Option key, Open With changes to Always Open With and your next selection then will change what happens when you double click on that app.
If you want to move a file from one folder to another in the Finder you can open two Finder windows and drag and drop between them. But you could also do it with just one Finder window open using Copy and Paste. You select the file that you want and you could do Edit Copy, or Command C. Then you could go to the folder that you want to move it to and you can either use Command V to put a duplicate of that item there or Option Command V and it will move the item to that location.
You're probably know you can hit Command Space and use the Spotlight search box to perform basic calculations. But you can actually perform calculations that you can't even do in the Calculator app. So, for instance, I could do 2+4*(5+1) using parentheses there and that's difficult to do in the calculator because the order of operations. You can also do unit conversions. So using the Spotlight menu I can do something like 7 feet and you can see it's going to give me an automatic conversion to 2.13 meters. If that's not the conversion you wanted you can look here on the right and see more options or just use the word to and something else. Like to miles or to inches. You can also do currency conversions here. So, for instance, I could see something is 16 dollars and you'll see it converts it to euros. Here is gives me some more options or I could just type to and get exactly the currency that I want.
If you delete a file by moving it to the Trash and then later on decide you want to get it back you can go into the Trashcan and Control click on the file and there will be an option to put it back. It remembers which folder it came from and when you use Put Back it goes back to that location.  You probably know if you select a file and you want to get info on it you can use Command i or File, Get Info. But this window will stick with that current file no matter what is selected. However if instead of Command i use Command Option i and then it changes to Show Inspector. This will bring up a window that changes with your selection. So here it shows me the info for this file. But if I click here it will change to show me the info for the selected file. 
You can set the background of a folder to a color or an image. You have to be in Icon View. Then go to View, Show View Options or Command J. At the bottom you'll see Background: Default, Color, or Picture. You can change to color and then select a color for the background or you can change to picture and then drag and drop an image there and it becomes the background for that folder.
See these buttons here at the top right. These are called the Menu Bar icons. You can change the order of any of them except the two here on the right. This is very useful especially because sometimes menus extend and knock off the first few of these. So you want to have your most important ones to the right. Just hold the Command key and drag left or right here to change the order that they are in. Also drag down and out to remove them. 
When replying to somebody in Mail sometimes you don't want to quote the entire message back to them. Just the part that you want to respond to. Go to Mail Preferences and under Composing select Include selected text, if any, otherwise include all text. Then you can select just a piece of the original message, hit Reply, and the quote will only include that piece, not the entire message.
If you have multiple tabs open in Safari you can use the Control key, not Command but Control, and Tab to move between them and it loops through. You can also use Shift and Tab with the Control key to go backwards. You can use the Command key and a number to jump to any tab. So Command 2 jumps to the second tab, Command 3 to the third tab, and Command 9 will always jump to the last tab no matter how many tabs are open.
In the Finder you won't be able to easily find your Library folder. But if you use the Go menu and hold down the Option key, Library appears as one of the options and you can jump right to your user Library folder quickly.
A good time management tool is to have your Mac announce the time every so often. You can go to System Preferences and then Date & Time and under Clock you can turn on Announce the time and have it On the hour, On the half hour, On the quarter hour and even customize which voice the Mac uses to tell you the time. 
In the Calendar app you don't have to click on a certain date and then fill out a form to add an event. You can just use the Plus button here and then type in plain English. Something like this and the entire event is added with the date and time and title all set.
When you're looking at a folder in the Finder here you can hold the Command key and click on the title at the top to move up to any level above the folder. If you just want to move to the level right above it just use Command and the up arrow to instantly go there.
When you want to type an accent mark over a letter all you need to do is press the letter on your keyboard, like say the letter e, and hold it down for a second. You'll get a list of options here. You can click one with the mouse or just hit its number to use that accent mark. If you want to type a special character or emoji all you need to do is hold the Control and Command keys down and press the spacebar. You get this special window here where you can scroll through all the different special characters that you want. You can also use the Search bar at the top to narrow it down to select the specific character. Just double click it to add it to your document. 
When you want to go back to a webpage that you've been to before you can use your Safari History. You can also search your History by selecting Show All History and then you can use the Search box here at the top to narrow things down. 
If you want to delete a lot of text you can press the Delete key over and over again or hold the Delete key down to slowly delete character by character. But you can also hold down the Option key to delete one word at a time or the Command key to delete all the way back to the beginning of that line. So you can very quickly delete a lot of text.

Comments: 12 Responses to “21 Useful Mac Tips In 8 Minutes”

Shirley

5 years ago

You can also start a word then use Option plus tap on the Escape keys to get a list of words that start with your original typing.

Fred Nelson

Although at least 90% of your readings are useful to me, "21 Useful Mac Tips - -" is without any doubt the most useful.

Cameron C Cook

I've been a Mac user for over ten years and this article showed me many things I did not know. Thanks!

Robert Werthman

Thank you for these great tips Gary.

Ann Mulhern

Love the tips-any chance of getting a cheat sheet to remember these?
Thank you.

Gary Rosenzweig

Ann: A sheet would be hard since some of them need more explanation. But I do have a book you can get with 101 tips (free) https://macmost.com/101-mac-tips

Richard Gnaedinger

Presently, I need to know how to move the icons around the desktop and keep them where I need them so I can work with them. It is incredible that my new iMac doesn't have that feature. All the older iMacs (many of them) that I have used all had that as part of the Mac. To me it is a "Black Mark" against Apple not to have this most important feature on the new iMacs. This action or lack of action was an insult and most intimidating to me.

Richard: If you cannot drag icons on the desktop to where you want them, it means that you have View, Sort By set to something other than None. Also, make sure View, Stacks is set to off.

Lisa

These were great - thanks. I'm wondering if there's a quick and easy way to see the dimensions of images in Finder. The info is good about listing file size and type, but so often I need to reference the width and height and then waste time opening it in Photoshop to get that info. Any ideas?

Lisa: Lots of ways. You should see the dimensions in the Preview pane in the Finder. View, Show Preview if you have it turned off. In Icon view you can see it if you turn on Show Item Info under View, Show View Options.

Hi Gary - Follow-up to the missing image dimensions in Finder. It looks like this is only not showing up when I'm viewing files that reside on my NAS. If I'm in my local folders (Documents, Pictures, etc.) dimensions show up fine, but when accessing files on a NAS, all I get are Tags, Created and Modified (I do have other options selected in View, Show Preview Options, but no info gets displayed). Possible fix for this shortcoming?

Lisa: Really hard for me to guess what could be going on. Is the drive formatted something different than for Mac? Is it excluded from Spotlight indexing? Could be other factors too.

Comments Closed.

21 Useful Mac Tips In 8 Minutes

Comments: 12 Responses to “21 Useful Mac Tips In 8 Minutes”

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