Posts By: Gary Rosenzweig

Conditional Highlighting in Numbers lets you color a cell based on the contents of that cell. If you need to set a cell to highlight based on the contents of other cells, you can use the IF function first, and then the conditional highlighting based on the results of that IF function.

If you accidentally record video on your iPhone in vertical mode, you end up with two ugly black bars on either side of the video when viewing it on a TV. You can use iMovie to fill in those sides with an animated background, or a blurry copy of the same video. Take a look at a variety of techniques for dealing with vertical video in iMovie.

Every decide to go through your Mac’s Trash before emptying it, only ti be frustrated because you can’t open any files while they are in the Trash to see what they are? Well, you can simply use Quick Look. Just select the file and hit the spacebar to see the contents. Most common file types are supported. Then you can use the arrow keys to move to the other files in the trash without closing the Quick Look window.

You can use Spotlight for more than just basic addition. You can use a full set of functions including powers, roots, trigonometry, logs, parenthesis and a variet

You can easily set up a guest wi-fi network with an Apple base station. Using a guest network allows you to share you connection with guests to your house without endangering your main network with all of your devices. It appears as it you have two separate wi-fi base stations instead of one. You can change the guest network password frequently without needing to re-enter the password for your own devices that are connected to your main network.

Mac Pages: Mastering Apple’s Word Processing App is a complete course with more than 60 lessons that show you all of the features in the Pages app. It includes more than three-and-a-half hours of video tutorials.

Want to see the names of your files in a larger font size in a Finder window? Just bring up the View Options controls by choosing View, Show View Options in the menu bar or using Command+J. Then change the Text Size setting. You can bump it up from the default 12 all the way to 16.

An app in the Mac App Store allows you to edit photos from the Photos app using any editor on your Mac. By installing this app and enabling its extension, you can jump from Photos to an editor of your choice and back again without creating any temporary files or wasting time.

Sometimes you have non-consecutive data in Numbers that you wish to chart. For instance, you may have skipped dates or large gaps in time. However, you want to graph the data with a consistent timeline at the bottom of the graph even if all of the dates are not represented. Here is one method for doing that, using a second hidden table that is automatically populated from the main table.

You can use QuickTime Player for very simple video editing without setting up a whole project in iMovie or Final Cut Pro. With QuickTime Player, you can combine trimming, appending more clips, and splitting clips to arrange and export edited movies.

Say you have a folder full of documents that you don’t want to appear in Spotlight searches. For instance, you may have 9,000 data files for work in a folder that are full of text and always clog up your search results. You can remove this folder from searches by going to System Preferences, Spotlight, Privacy and using the + button to add that folder. Or, just drag the folder into that list to add it.

If you need to hand your iPhone or iPad over to a child, consider using Guided Access to lock them into a single app and restrict what they can do. Guided Access allows you to turn off buttons and controls and even set time limits. You can regain access to your device with a password or Touch ID.

Thanks. I’ve added your email address to the list. I’ll send out an email when the course is ready. I’m hoping for the middle of June.

With the latest versions of OS X and iOS you can set reminders so that you get an alert when you enter or exit your car. The trick is that you should have your iPhone’s Bluetooth paired to your car. Then create a reminder in the Reminders app to remind you “At a Location” and select either “Getting in Car” or “Getting out of Car.” You can set these Reminders on your Mac, iPad, iPhone or any device that is hooked into your iCloud account and using the latest OS. Then your iPhone is most likely going to be the one to notify you since that is probably the device you will be pairing with your car.

You can have a lot of fun using your iPhone's camera and various photography apps. In this example, take a look at using the 360 Panorama app from Occipital. You can easily capture an image that includes everything around you, then view it later on your iPhone or any other device. You can also share these via email or social media.

Trend lines can help you find meaning in what could seem like random data. One example looks at daily sales for a store and finds an upward trend over the course of a year. Another example looks at physics data and converts it to a mathematical formula.

If you select a file in the Finder, then use Edit, Copy or Command+C and then use Edit, Paste or Command+V to paste it into a TextEdit, Pages or some other text area, you’ll get the file name. But if you use Command+Option+C you will then be able to paste the full path of the file. This even works when you select multiple files or all of the files in a folder. You will then get each name or path on a separate line.

When you get junk email, you should never trust the from field to be accurate. It is easy to fake the from field making the email appear to come from anyone, even people you know. Spammers will use this to fool people into opening their email. If someone gets spam that appears to come from you, most likely it is not because your computer or email account have been compromised, but simply that your email address is being spoofed.

With Safari in El Capitan you can subscribe to news feeds in the left sidebar and see an aggregated list of items that update automatically. You can also include Twitter and LinkedIn feeds. This allows you to see the news from your favorite sources all in one place without needing to go to individual web sites.

Scrolling areas, like your browser window, will only show the scroll bars on the right when you are scrolling using the trackpad or mouse. But you can turn them on permanently if you wish by going to System Preferences, General, Show scroll bars. Just change this to Always. I find this useful if you commonly use Screen Sharing as hidden scroll bars don’t work well in that case.