MacMost: Archives

Did you know that that there are three different types of dashes: the hyphen, en dash and em dash? Most people use the hyphen for everything, but the en and em dashes should be used in many cases instead of a hyphen. Learn how to type them and when to use them.

If you receive a Microsoft Word document from someone who seems to think that everyone has Word, it can be frustrating. But you have several options to view and even edit the Word document on your Mac without buying anything. You can use Quick Look or Preview to view the file. TextEdit can be used to get access to simple text documents. Pages can open Word documents and most formatting is retained. You can also edit and export back out in Word format. The ultimate solution is to spend the money to get Word from the App Store, though it requires a paid subscription.

You can create contacts, set up calendar events, and get intel on pieces of text in incoming email, web pages and other documents using Data Detectors and Look Up. This feature of macOS will figure out what information represents, such as a location or appointment time, or business name or person, and allow you to act on it.

What if you need to connect to your iCloud account, but your iPhone doesn't have an Internet connection? Then you won't get a prompt with the two-factor code, but you can still generate the code manually and use it even though your iPhone isn't connected. Two-factor codes don't need to rely on Internet connections for verification. You can also get a code from your Mac even if it isn't connected.

After updating to Mojave, many Mac users see a message saying that an app they are trying to use needs to be updated and won't work with future versions of macOS. By future versions, that means the next major update of macOS, probably coming in late 2019, not minor updates. Before then, you can update to a newer version of that app, or find an alternative app to use in its place.

The photo editor in the Mac Photos app includes a lot of shortcuts that can help speed up editing, especially if you need to make adjustments to a range of photos. You can enter and exit editing mode quickly, move between photos without leaving the editor, jump to different editing modes, and compare the original to your adjustments easily. You can also fine-tune cropping and rotations.

The most powerful keyboard shortcut for your Mac is the Tab key. This single key helps you get around in windows, dialog boxes and even web pages. You can modify how it works in System Preferences and also in Safari's preferences. Once you master using the Tab key you can speed up your computer use by keeping your hands on your keyboard more and using your mouse or trackpad less.

You can create a very short Automator action to take text as input, manipulate it, and replace the original text. In this example, we'll create a Javascript JXA action that encloses the text in quotes. You can use this in conjunction with a keyboard shortcut to quickly apply quotes in Pages and other apps.

Sometimes you need a series of shortcuts to accomplish a task, not just one. In this tutorial, you'll learn how to create three small shortcuts to save and recall text clippings. The first two allow you to save the clipboard or the selection to a file in a folder. The third shortcut lets you recall one of those clips so you can paste it into a document, email, note or just about anything.

A common complaint from Mojave users is that when you copy and paste a file icon to create a custom icon for a file or folder, the result is blurry. It turns out that this only happens when the icon image is not square. Convert the image to a square one, or copy a square portion of the image, and the result is crisp and clear.

You can share the screen of another Mac pretty easily. But it seems like it is impossible to do the same with another account on the same Mac. However, if you use Terminal to set up an ssh tunnel, you can share the screen of a second account using an alternate port number. This allows you to stay logged in to one account, while you use another account in a screen sharing window.