5 Mac Tips For Students

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are 5 tips for students to get the most from their Mac. 

So your Mac has tons of features that can help you as a student. For instance, instead of getting notifications throughout a class or while studying you can setup Focus Modes. Go into System Settings and then look on the left for Focus. You've got some Focus Modes there by default. But you can create new ones. Like, for instance, let's create a custom one for when you're in class. Choose an icon. Maybe choose one of your school's colors and then you can set everything up for how you want your Mac to behave while you're in class.

For instance, you may want to get no notifications from anybody or Allow specific people to send you notifications. Things will still appear in the Notifications Center on your right. The messages will still come in. You just won't be bothered by them as much while you're in this mode. You'll probably want to add one for while you're in class and then add another one for when you are studying, like that. Now you might want to add just a few people or a few apps that can notify you while you're studying.

Then to switch between these modes go to Control Center up here and them look for the Focus Mode box, usually at the top right. You can go in here. Switch to Class, switch to Studying, switch to completely Do Not Disturb. If you select one of these then you can now return here anytime you want, click once and it turns it off. 

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Now, of course, you're going to be getting tons of PDF files and they are going to have lots of information from full course notes to chapters of books, and things like that. If you double click on them they should open up in Preview. You don't need to install any third party app like Adobe Acrobat Reader. Preview will work just fine for almost all PDFs. When you're in Preview you can select something and easily Highlight it by clicking right here. You can select the highlight type by clicking right next to it. So I can choose this kind of highlight instead. Then as you go through and highlight different things you'll find that you can now click here and go to the Highlights & Notes sidebar. Now you'll see everything that you've highlighted here. You can jump easily to it. You can also, at any point, click this little Markup Tool here and now you can go in and you can add Arrows, you can add Circles, you can add Text and annotate as you like. Play around with all of these. There's a lot of cool things you can do including just drawing if you want. But you can also add things like little speech bubbles here. So you can grab this little green dot here and point at something and then you can type something right here and make a little note. You can also add these little post-it notes that will appear and they shrink down and you click on them again and you can see the text that you typed in there. Notice that those will appear in the left sidebar too and you can completely mark this stuff up. If you Quit and them go back in it's all still there. 

If you are using a PDF, say you're looking at a webpage like this, you can always go to File, and then Export as PDF, and export a PDF version of a webpage. Then you can go into that PDF right here and you've got all of those same tools. 

Now, of course, as a student every semester you get a new schedule. It can be useful to put that schedule in your calendar. But you don't want to schedule each and every class time. The first thing I would do is create a New Calendar specifically for that semester. So I want to go to File, and then New Calendar and I can call it something like Fall 2025. It's just going to have things for that semester. Then with that selected I double-click here and create a new event, like that. I'll set the time, let's say it's an 11:00 a.m. class till noon, and this will just create that single one class time. But I can go to Repeat and then Custom. Here I can indicate that it is Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Then, Okay. You can see it's going to be now every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday from that point on. Don't worry about that. Just go to the last class day, let's say this is the last one. I'll go to the one past that and I will select it, press Delete. I can select Delete All Future Events. So now it's just for that range. If there is a specific class that gets canceled I can select it, Delete, and Delete Only This Event. I can customize the whole schedule that way. If one of them changes, like let's say this class is actually going to meet earlier I can change it like that and say, Only This Event. I can do that for each of my classes and have my whole schedule here. I can click Day, like that, and it will show my schedule for that day in a timeline mode and in a List on the right. Then when the Fall semester is over I can simply disable the entire calendar. I still have it there in case I want to go back to it but it won't be visible anymore. 

Now when doing research online you may find you open a lot of different Tabs to go to different websites and pages to, say, research a paper. But then you do the for five different classes and suddenly you've got tons of tabs and it's a whole mess. You can use Tab Groups to tame this mess. So this is mostly things pertaining to one research  paper I'm writing. I can select one of these tabs, hold the Command Key and select multiple ones. So I'll select just these four. Then I'm going to click on this button right here, next to the Sidebar button, and I can select New Tab Group with four selected tabs. So I'll create a new Tab Group and I'll call it something that makes sense, like that. Now I can go back to my main Tab Group and I just have that one Tab left there. This can just be all my normal sites. If I want to go back to the research I can go to it this Tab Group and all of those tabs are still there. I can have a ton of different Tab Groups so I can leave them around for a long time. All semester if needed. 

Now as the semester goes on you're going to accumulate a lot of different documents. You're going to be writing papers. You're going to be getting PDFs. All sorts of different things. So you probably want to organize them nicely. The Best place to organize files is in your Documents Folder. So choose Documents here on the left, or use Go and then Documents, and then create folders in here that make sense. For instance you may want to create a folder that is for your Classes. Then inside of Classes you may want to create a New Folder for the semester, like that. Then inside of that you may want to create folders for each individual class, like that. Then if you use List View you can go back up and see your classes, by semester, and then by class, like that, and then everything inside. You can put all of your different files and everything for this class in here. 

I know that the reality is that a lot of students either have to use Goggle Docs or are just in the habit of doing so. Those don't exist as files on your drive. You can add Links to those Goggle Docs right in here. So, for instance, here is a Goggle Doc that could be notes for a class. You can add a Link to it in here by simply dragging the URL here into the folder. If you click here to select the URL then you have to select the little icon here to drag. But either way you can drag into here and now you'll see this Web Link here to that document. Just double click it and it will go right to that Goggle Doc. It works the same for any other online document system or maybe materials provided by your professor. You can just drag any URL you want into your folder and you'll have a link to it along side all the other files you're using for that class. 

So there's some useful Mac tips for students. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.