An Introduction To Shortcuts On The Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's an introduction to the Shortcuts App in macOS Monterey. 

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So by far the most powerful new feature in macOS Monterey is the Shortcuts App. The Shortcuts App has been around for a few years in iOS and iPad iOS and now it comes to the Mac. The Shortcuts App allows you to automate tasks on your Mac. It's similar to Automator. In fact it will probably eventually replace it. 

So when you launch the Shortcuts App you'll see some things here on the left. The Gallery and then some containers here for All Shortcuts, Quick Actions and Menu Bar. These will probably all be empty. But they may already contain shortcuts that you created on your iPhone and iPad and since it syncs across iCloud you'll see those here. Those will actually work on your Mac as long as the functions that they invoke are actually on the Mac as well. So, for instance, launching an app like Safari may work on both the iPhone and the Mac. But something else specific to the iPhone won't work on your Mac. 

Let's take a look at the Gallery here. Apple includes a ton of shortcuts that you can easily add. You don't have to do any programming at all. So at the top you'll see things like Starter Shortcuts, Shortcuts for Accessibility, Great with Siri, Widget Shortcuts, Share Sheet Shortcuts, etc. Then you'll see some other things down here like Get Stuff Done, Get Organized, Essentials, Work From Anywhere. So you could look through all of these and see if any of these shortcuts would be things that you might use. If we look in one of these sections here, like Starter Shortcuts, we could see a bunch of shortcuts here. Now it's important to realize that not only can you use these shortcuts but you could examine them as well. A great way to learn how to make shortcuts is by looking at all of these different shortcuts that Apple includes to see how they work. 

So let's take one like New Note with Date. I'm going to use Plus here to Add it. So now I've added it and you could see under All Shortcuts it now shows one. If I switch there I could see my shortcut. So I've taken a copy of this from the Gallery and I've put it into My Shortcuts. Now I can use it. If I use the Play button here I could simply run the Shortcut. It's the simplest way to run the shortcut. Launch the Shortcuts App, view it here in All Shortcuts, and then click Play. But the Shortcuts App also allows you to Edit these. So you simply double click on the main part of the shortcut, not the Play button, it will open it up. Now you can see the steps inside. So here this basically does four things. Right here it creates Note with the current date and in Folder. It doesn't include anything there. So it's not going to put it in a folder. It asks for text with the prompt, What Do You Want to Say?. Then it appends that input into that Note and then it shows the Note. You could see they have included Comments here in-between these so it can explain a little bit more of what's going on. You could include comments in the shortcuts you make as well. But you'll find them really useful for the shortcuts that already exist because they will explain how they work and you can learn from them.

Now let's run this shortcut and see it in action. You could see the first time you run it it's going to ask for permission to access Notes. So we'll allow that. It won't ask for that again. Now here's that prompt. Let's just type something in here and Done. You could see now it created that note with the date and it put our starter text in there. Now it's a regular note. If we go back into here we can see how we can alter this. For instance, we can have a folder for these to go into directly. We may want to change current date to something else or maybe change the format here. So we can change the Format for the date or the time and that will change how the shortcut works. We can change this prompt from what you want it to say to something else. If I click on Show More here we can see there's the default answer and that we can set to something. So if most of the time we create a note with some default text there we can add it in here just to make it easier to create those notes. Maybe we don't want to create the note right there and then. We can actually use the X button here and remove this last step. So it doesn't show us the note at the end. It just creates it. 

For every shortcut there's setting you can get to over here. So you can detemine where else you can run this. So right now we have to launch Shortcut and hit the Play button for that Shortcut to run it. But we can also use Pin in Menu Bar. When you do that it will appear in this special menu here. Click that and you could see all of the notes that you selected Pin in Menu Bar and you could easily run them without launching the Shortcuts App first. You can also set Shortcuts to run as Quick Actions. So Quick Actions typically take input. Like you select a file and run a Quick Action. Or you select some text in a document and run a Quick Action. You can have it as a Quick Action in the Finder. You can have it in the Touch Bar if you have a Mac with a Touch Bar. You could also have it in the Services Menu so you can access it from the Menu Bar. If you select Add Keyboard Shortcut it will add to the Services Menu and allow you to Add the shortcut right here. You don't have to go to System Preferences, Keyboard Shortcuts to add it. Although you certainly still could do that.

Under Privacy you'll see permissions that the shortcut has been granted. Remember we granted an access to Notes so that's here and we could always revoke that here. Let's go look at another shortcut in the Gallery here. Let's use Turn Text Into Audio.

So before I actually add it with the Plus button I could double click it here and it will give me information about it. So it gives me a description and other things about it like, this will appear in the Apple Watch as well. I can add shortcuts. I can also quit here and actually preview the shortcut. So if I just want to learn what steps are in the Shortcut I can do that without ever adding it. Now we can see here it's going to receive text from the Input. So it's going to work as a Quick Action. If there's no input it's going to ask for text. Then it's going to make Spoken Audio and then Show That Spoken Audio in QuickLook. So let's add this. Now when we go to Shortcuts we've got that there. So here I am in TextEdit. Let's select this text here. Now you can go to TextEdit, Services and if I look under Shortcuts you can see Turn Text Into Audio. So it appears here now. If I select it you could see it turns it into audio and it brings up QuickLook showing that audio. I can now play it. (playing audio). 

Now what if you want to create your own shortcut. You can do that with the Plus button here or File New Shortcut. It creates a blank shortcut here. Notice on the right we have all these different steps. These actions that we can add to the shortcut. We can search through them. We can view them by categories. So here we have Suggestions. We can do Scripting, Sharing, Favorites, Location. We can go by App and we can actually look at apps. Here are the ones that have to do with the Books App. Here are ones that have to do with Calendar. If we want there's an i button next to every action. Here we could click that and get more information about each one. We could double click to Add it or Drag and Drop it over. 

So let's create a really simple shortcut. What I wanted to do is Quit all apps except Safari and Main. If Safari and Mail aren't running actually launch them. So when i run the Shortcut and it's done I'll always only have Safari and Mail running. So first let's search for Quit. Sure enough there's Quit App. I'll double click that to Add it. You can see there are prompts here. Quit App and then Choose. So we can choose the app to Quit. But if I click here you'll see that another option is All Apps. So I'll quit all apps except now we don't want to have Safari and Mail quit. So let's search for Safari and let's search for Mail. You can see it now says Quit All Apps except Mail and Safari. Under Show More you can see it says Ask to Save Changes. So we'll leave that on just in case. 

Now we want it to launch apps. So we search for Launch and we see there's one called Open App. So what if Mail and Safari aren't running in the first place. We want to make sure they get launched. So let's launch Mail first and Safari second so Safari always ends up on top. So I'll select Mail here and if Mail was already running and never Quit now it's just opening up so it's moving to the front. But if Mail wasn't running then it was never Quit but now what's going to launch it fresh.  Let's add it again Open and this time Safari and so now it will quit all apps except Mail and Safari. It will open Mail and open Safari. So we should end up with Safari at the front most app. Let's name this Quit All Except Mail and Safari. Let's look at the options here. This would be really useful to have up here in the Menu Bar. So I'll select Pin In Menu Bar. One more thing I want to do is I want to change the icon here. So I click here and I can select another color and I can also select another icon. So I'll just pick one here at random. Now that's what the icon looks like. Now we'll close this. We'll see here the color and the icon are there. We can run it from here. But we can also run it from here. 

Let's Quit Shortcuts and I'm going to launch a bunch of apps. So I've got a bunch of apps running including Safari but not including Mail. So now if I run this it should Quit everything. Safari should remain there. Mail should launch and Safari should launch again bringing it to the front since it's already running. So there you go! I've got Safari here running in the front. Notice Mail has launched and it is running as well. 

Now there's some advanced settings you should know about. If you go to Shortcuts Preferences and then to Advanced you see you can allow running scripts. This allows Apple Scripts, JAVA Scripts, and Shell Scripts to run. Something that Automator uses a lot. So if you want to do advanced things you're going to want to Allow those. There are also restrictions on using large amounts of data like Sharing it or Deleting it and you can turn off those restrictions by checking these here. So, for instance, if I create another shortcut here I can go into Apple Script and you could see Run Apple Script, there's also run JAVA Script. There I can add this in and I could run Apple Script just like I can in Automator. You could also run Shell Script or run Shell Over SSH. So if I test this out in here you'll see it gives me Hello world.

That definitely makes this a lot more powerful than Shortcuts on the iPhone or iPad. If you're wondering about the future of Automator and Shortcuts right now they coexist side-by-side. Automator is there fully supported in macOS Monetery. Now eventually Shortcuts may take over completely. There's actually a way to import Automator workflows into Shortcuts. In Shortcuts you can go to File, Import and you can select an Automator workflow. Here I've got one that just has one thing in it. It launches Calculator. But if I open it up you can see it converts it to the Shortcut action, Open Calculator. Now also note there are great ways to Share these. So you go into a Shortcut like this. You click here and then you could Share using various ways for Copy a Link. Now it's going to use iCloud for this. You Copy the Link and then you go to Safari or more likely somebody else goes to Safari because you shared the link with them. They would see this. A shortcut and it just has the name there. If they use Get Shortcut it's going to ask for permission and it will go into Shortcuts but it won't install it click here and actually inspect the shortcut. So you can use this just to examine the shortcut and see what actions they are using in it. So you can learn from it. Or just to verify it does what you want. Then you can click Add Shortcut to add it. So when you see people sharing shortcuts online this is how they are doing it. 

So that's a basic overview of using Shortcuts. What you really need to do is just play around with it. Create a blank shortcut and then dig down here using Categories, All Actions and see everything that's possible. Examine the things that you find interesting here. See what they do. Maybe try adding them. Run them in here like I'm doing like this and you can just see the result here. Then, of course, go into Apple's Gallery here and examine all of the things that are in here. If you want to see what something does or how it works you could just click on it. You can click here and then see exactly what it's doing. Then you can use that same command in your own shortcut if you don't want to use this specific one from the Gallery.

Shortcuts is going to be a whole new world of things to try for Mac users. I plan on doing lots of tutorials in the future. Perhaps even a course on it. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.