7 Ways To Use the Help Menu

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at some different ways that you can use the Help menu on your Mac. 

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So when you look in the Menu Bar on your Mac in just about any app you're going to see that the last item is Help. As you may expect the Help menu is a way to get to documentation for the app that you're using. But it can do so much more than that. For instance here I am in Pages and if I go to the Help menu I can see here Pages Help. If I choose that it's going to bring up a special Help window which gives me access and documentation. Usually I can browse through it and very often you're going to see a Table of Contents link here at the top. Click on that and you get a Table of Contents here on the left. You can select an item here and then it will take you to that part of the documentation for that app. 

So here I am in the Mail App and I go to Help and there is Mail Help. I can view the Help here. I can click on the Table of Contents and I can jump to any section there that I like. Here in the Photos App the same thing. Photos Help and there is a Table of Contents right here. I can click on it and jump to different sections. Here in Freeform the same thing. Go to Help and then Freeform Help. Then I can jump to the different sections in the Table of Contents. There is also a Search button right there. You click on that and then you can search for something. It will give you search results for the documentation. 

Another thing you can often find in the Help menu is an item called What's New. So here in Pages I find What's New in Pages. I can select that and it is going to tell me what's new in the latest version of Pages. So a lot of times you hear that there is a new version of something. You read an article or watch a video it tells you what's new and then later on when you go to use the app you forget what the new things were. You can often find them in the Help menu right here. In fact most of the time the articles and videos actually draw on the same information. 

Even third party apps will use the Help menu with access to documentation and a What's New item. But third party developers are free to do what they want so they may or may not have documentation or a What's New item in the Help menu. 

Now even though the Help Menu seems to lead you to documentation for the app you're using you can actually get the documentation for your entire system no matter what app you're in. So here, for instance, I'm going to choose Pages Help and it's going to bring up the little Help app here. It's a little window that floats above everything else. There's the Search box here. If I search for something, like I'm going to search for iCloud, notice I do get items here at the top that pertain to that app. So here are 26 results for Pages for the keyword iCloud. But under that I can see Other Help. This gives me help entries for other apps like Notes, Finder, and Photos. A lot of times you're going to find just general system information like where to find things in System Settings and such. So even if the information you're looking for doesn't pertain to that app you can still get to it through the Help menu. At the bottom here you're going to see more results on the web. Notice we're in the Pages app here. So when I click on that it's going to do a search and you can see the search is for the search term but also it's going to include Pages and the version of macOS I was using. 

But the Help menu does more than just give you documentation. You can also use it to find menu items. So, for instance, here I am in Pages. In Pages I've got some pretty deep menus here with lots of submenus. For instance under Insert I can go to Line and then I can insert a line with arrowhead. Now suppose I know that menu item exists but I don't remember where it is. I don't remember its name Insert Menu or maybe I don't remember that it is in the Line submenu. I can find it using Help. If I just remember that the word Arrow was in there somewhere. I can search for arrow and then I can see various menus that include the word arrow, including the one I want. I can select it right here and it will actually execute that command. So I didn't have to go to the Insert Menu at all. I can use Help to find it and to activate the item. 

Note that when I did this it not only showed me a list of items here and allowed me to select one, but it also showed me where that item really is. So I can see that it is in Insert, under Line, and there's line with an arrowhead. It's got that kind of moving pointer right there to show me where it is at. 

So if your goal is to learn an app really well and remember where all the menu items are what I recommend is use the Help menu to find something. But once you find it look carefully where it is and then instead of activating it here, then actually go to the item itself and use it there. This will help you to remember for future use where that item is. 

Now the Help Menu actually has a keyboard shortcut. It's a universal keyboard shortcut across all your apps. You won't see it up here in the Menu Bar or in the Menu itself. But it's actually Command and question mark, which on US keyboards is actually Command Shift and slash because the question mark key is Shift and slash. So use Command Shift Slash and you can see it brings up the Help menu and actually has a blinking text cursor in the Search field without ever having to touch the mouse or trackpad. Now you can use the arrow keys to go down and select an item with Return or Space. But you could also just start typing here in Search. So I can start typing like that and then when I see the item I want I can move with the down arrow to that item and use the Spacebar or Return to activate it. This means that you can access any item in the Menu with a keyboard shortcut. Notice that Insert Line, Line with Arrowhead doesn't have a keyboard shortcut assigned. But I was able to get to it and activate it only using the keyboard with the Help menu. 

You can take the keyboard shortcuts one step further. If you want to access any part of the menu you can do so using the same Shift Command and then slash or question mark to get to the Help Menu. But now that you're here instead of down arrow to go to one of the items below you can use the left arrow to actually navigate to a menu and then once you're there you can go down to the right, down and you can use the Return or Spacebar to activate an item like that. 

Now I should add that if you go to System Settings and then go to Keyboard and then under Keyboard go to Keyboard shortcuts, then go to Keyboard you're going to find a Move Focus to the Menu Bar Item here that will do the same thing but it will take you to either the Alpha Menu or the Last Menu you were using. However I find this doesn't work 100% of the time whereas Shift Command Question mark does. It is also a lot easier to remember. In addition I should point out that if you go to App Shortcuts here and then go to All Applications the only item that is there by default and you actually can't even remove it, is Show Help Menu. So here you can make sure it is activated. You may have turned it off in the past. You can also change the keyboard shortcut, although I highly recommend that you keep it at the easy to remember Command Question Mark or Shift Command Slash. But if your really want you can make it say a single key press like using one of the f keys. 

So the next time you need to figure out how to do something in an app try using the Help Menu, go into the documentation or searching. The next time you need to find a menu item or maybe just activate from the keyboard even if there is o keyboard shortcut try using Shift Command Slash and get to it through the Help Menu. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.