8 Ways To Stay Curious and Learn New Things On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Ever wonder how I know all these little tricks and tips on the Mac. Well, it is because I'm curious and I explore. Let me show you how to do it. 

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So, how do I know all these different tips and tricks? How do I always come up with these little things that nobody else seemed to notice? Well, it is because I just explore all the time in all the different apps in the operating system. For instance, here in Pages I may just go through all of the different menu items and take a look at what each one does. Maybe spend some time exploring each one of these things to see what all these submenus do.  See what happens when I bring them up. Here's a shape. Here are all the different things you can do with text, styling, arrangements in shapes. I try all these different things. I play around and every once in a while I come up with something new. But even if I don't I get better at dealing with all of the different interface elements here. Doing different things and using Pages.

Now, I can understand if you're reluctant to do that while you're working on a document. After all you've got this perfectly put together and you want to, say, experiment with this shape here. Do you really want to do it in your main document? You can always try to change something and then if you don't like it you can just use Undo. But also another good thing to do is just to have sample documents. To create sample documents all the time go to File, New, Create a sample one here, it's blank, and try things in here. Maybe even copy and paste elements from one document to another and then play around with the different things you can do here and try them out. If you get something you like you can repeat those steps over here or even Copy and Paste back. Nothing changes in your original document. The one that is really important and you don't want to screw up until you are sure you've got everything down.

Now another thing you can do is to simply duplicate the document. You think you want to make some changes but you want to know that you can go back to it you can, or course, rely on the ability to Revert To. But you can also simply duplicate that document. Now I've got two. You can see this one I haven't saved yet and maybe I won't even save it. Maybe I'll go in here and I'll make changes to text and do all sorts of different things, try some things out and I'm not changing my original document at all. I'm just playing around with this one. Maybe I just learned something new and then I close this one and delete it and go back to working on this one. Or maybe the new thing I learned I'm going to now apply in the original document. 

Now you can apply the same thing to the whole Mac User Interface. Say you want to play around with the Dock or with some Accessibility settings or your Desktop wallpaper. But you don't want to screw things up in your main account. You can create a second account. Just go into System Settings and in there go down to Users & Groups. Here you can add an account. You can create this account. Use your name. Use a different account name. Maybe something temporary or to indicate that it is not something you're going to keep. Give it its own password. Then to create that new User Account you don't even have to sign into iCloud in that new user account if you don't want to. You can use that second account and play around with the entire set of Mac Preferences and see what works, what doesn't, and it won't change your main account. Just switch back to your main account when you're done and maybe leave that one around for more testing or if you want to get rid of it you can always select that account here, click on the i button next to it, and delete it if you think you'll no longer will need it anymore. I very often create sample accounts, use them to test things out, and then delete them when I'm done. 

Now back in regular apps a lot of times apps include things like templates. If you go to New you get all these templates that you can take a look at. If you want to learn new things go into these templates and take a look at how they are built. For instance, here in numbers there are a whole bunch of templates. I can go, say, into this Running Log template, look at this chart, look at the data references, see how it is built with these different data references. If you go and look at the different cells here I can checkout some formatting. See what it has got. Here's a formula in here. You're seeing it is not just adding or dividing these two things. It's actually putting an If Error around it and that will actually prevent this from being an error if the distance is zero. It's just looking to see if both of these are actually numbers. Then it is going to give a number. Otherwise, say if I change the distant to zero, you see instead of an error I get a blank. So right there by exploring you might learn a little something, in this case how to use the IF Error function. 

Other times it helps when you're working in an app to set a goal. Something that you can't do or can't seem to do in the app but let's see if you can figure out a way. For instance I want to have text go across the top of this video here. Is there a way to do it? I can look through all of the different options for titles and I won't find anything that has the text at the top. But perhaps I could go and say take the centered one and put that there. I can see that it is centered. Let's see what happens if I get rid of the second line. That's fine. What if I just put a bunch of blank lines underneath. Ah, the text seems to go near the top. Let's see what that looks like. It doesn't really kind of match up the final product what's there I need to put it a little bit above that to actually get it to be where I want. There we go. So now I can go back in here. Maybe set this up for my text. Like that. Add a few extra lines and I get what I want. Often just playing around. But of course in iMovie I could have just created a new project to figure this out instead of messing around with the project I'm in the middle of working on. 

You can alway checkout documentation, perhaps. Like here in iMovie if I go to iMovie, Help there is iMove Help under that. You see there is a Table of Contents. We can go into the Table of Contents here and I could go and look at the different things that are there and read about them and maybe discover something I hadn't used before in iMovie. Likewise here in Pages if I go to Pages, Help up here there is a Table of Contents and then I can go in here and maybe look up things that maybe I hadn't thought about. Maybe I don't need to use facing pages but one day I could explore this and then when I do need to use it I've already learned how to do it or at least I know where to look to get that information. 

Finally, of course, there are online tutorials. My site, of course, is all online tutorials but  you could just search YouTube for lots of them by other people as well. At my site if you just want to explore you can click on Video Tutorials at the top and then it is broken down by category. So you can just search through, if you've got some spare time, and you want to learn a little something about using, say, iMovie. Then you can click here and get a list of just iMovie tutorials. Browse through them and maybe find one that looks interesting and jump to that and learn that new technique. 

The important thing though is that you just stay curious. Spend some time just exploring. Don't use an app only when you need to use it but set aside some time to create a sample document, maybe take old documents and see if you can improve them. Learn new skills so the next time you need to use that app to do something you're better at it and you have more techniques that you can draw on. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.