Rename And Move Files While Working On Them On Your Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how you can rename and even move files without having to stop working on them. 

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Now if you have been using computers for a long time you may think that you need to close a document in order to change the file name or move the file. That's definitely how it used to work for decades. You wouldn't, for instance, go into the Finder here, here's this document that I'm working on, and change its name while the document is open. Years ago that may have caused an error and may have even caused you to loose the entire document. But that's just not true anymore. You can change the name and even move the file while it's open.

So as an example I've got this document open here in Pages. Now if I wanted to rename the file I certainly could close the document rename it and reopen the new renamed file. But I can just do it with the document opened. There's several ways. 

One is simply to go to the File Menu. You're going to find a Rename option there. Select that. Notice that instead of coming up with a dialogue box asking for a new name it simply highlights the name here in the Title Bar. I can change the title. So I could change it to My Document 2.pages. Notice how it updates here in the Finder as well.

Now I don't have to go to the File Menu to do that. I could click here. You can see there's a little down arrow when I move my cursor over the name. Click there and it comes up with this little box that has Name, Tags, and even a location. I could change the name here the same way. You could see it updates there in the Finder. 

Now on top of that I could actually change the name in the Finder. Look what happens when I go over here. I'm going to hit Return to select the file name there. Now I'm going to change the file name, in the Finder, with it open in Pages. I notice that the document name updates there in Pages. 

So the Finder can handle a name change from within the app. But also the app can handle a name change from the Finder.

Now you can also move files when they are open. So here I have a document inside the Project A folder. Let's move it inside the Project B folder. Now you can see it's there and this didn't miss a beat here. As a matter of fact if I were to Control click here you can see the path. You can see that it is in the Project B folder. So moving the file in the Finder didn't effect Pages. In fact I can do it from inside Pages. I can go to File and then Move To and then I can select a new location for it. I can select something from this list here. It's going to list Favorites, Location, things like that. Even Other and Other will allow me to choose any location. So let's move this to Project C. Now you could see it's going to disappear from there and if I look at Project C the document is there now.I could also click here, just like I did with Renaming, and access where from here. Selecting one of these or choosing Other and then let's move it back up to Project A. Now you can see it goes there. 

Now this works in Pages, Numbers, Keynote, TextEdit. All sorts of things. Even third party apps. So here I have a document I'm working on in Pixelmator. You can see under File I have Rename. I have Move To. I can also click here and change the name right there. Set a new location for it. I can move this in the Finder there and Rename it. You can see it updates just fine. Here you can see Microsoft Word as well. I have this document saved to the Project A folder. You can see here in Word I can go to File and I can Move, I can Rename, I can click here and change the name, change the location. You can see here I can go into the Finder and I can change the name and it updates here as well.

Now does this work for every app? Well, not every app but most of them. Like for instance here Audacity, a popular sound editor for the Mac, it doesn't work because if I go to save the project and I save it out to here, to Project A, you're going to see not only do I get an Audacity file but I also get a folder here with some extra data in it. If I move those while this is open it's going to mess things up. 

What's a good way to tell whether or not a third party app supports this. Well, it's pretty easy. Go to File and if you don't see the Rename and Move commands here then you know you probably have to stick with the old technique of closing a file before you rename or move it.