Video Transcript / Captions
Closed captioning for this video is available on YouTube: Customizing the Menubar Clock.
Let's take a look at the clock on your Mac. It appears in the Menu Bar near the top right. You can highly customize how you have the time displayed there.
If you select it you'll see more information like the full date listed there. You can switch between digital and analog. I'm using Mac OS Sierra. Different versions of Mac OS, of course, might have different things there. If you do it as analog you just get this tiny little clock there. You can basically tell, more or less, what time it is. But digital gives you something more precise.
But you can customize this by going to Open Date and Time Preferences. You can get to the same thing by going to System Preferences and selecting Date & Time there.
Now here you've got three different sections at the top. You want to go to Clock. You can see you can highly customize what the Clock is. So one of the things you can do is you can remove it completely. So you don't have the date or time there. If you've got a clock maybe hanging over your computer or you don't really need it on your Mac then you can turn it off and save some screen space.
Once you have it on you can switch between digital and analog. There are no options for analog. But digital you have a lot. For instance you can display seconds. You can flash the colon between the time, the hour, the minute, the second there. So it kind of shows the passing of time. You can do a twenty-four hour clock. So one o'clock would be thirteen and eleven o'clock at night would be twenty-three. You can have it show AM or PM as well. So you can highly customize that.
You can also change what date is shown. To have the day of the week shown or not and the date shown or not. So you can go back and forth between all of those to figure that out.
You also have the option here to Announce the Time which will speak it. So you can have it say on the hour. Customize the voice and choose which voice to use to speak the time on the hour or you can do it every half hour or quarter hour as well. So that's handy if you want to keep track of your day a little more tightly.
Now if you want even more functionality you can go to third party applications. In the Mac App Store if you search for Menu Bar Clock you come up with a variety of different apps that will give you different types of clocks in the Menu Bar. You can flip through them and see what kind of functionality they provide. There are all sorts of different things. So if there is something special that you need chances are you'll find it by just looking for apps you can get in the App Store.
Let's take a look at the clock on your Mac. It appears in the Menu Bar near the top right. You can highly customize how you have the time displayed there.
If you select it you'll see more information like the full date listed there. You can switch between digital and analog. I'm using Mac OS Sierra. Different versions of Mac OS, of course, might have different things there. If you do it as analog you just get this tiny little clock there. You can basically tell, more or less, what time it is. But digital gives you something more precise.
But you can customize this by going to Open Date and Time Preferences. You can get to the same thing by going to System Preferences and selecting Date & Time there.
Now here you've got three different sections at the top. You want to go to Clock. You can see you can highly customize what the Clock is. So one of the things you can do is you can remove it completely. So you don't have the date or time there. If you've got a clock maybe hanging over your computer or you don't really need it on your Mac then you can turn it off and save some screen space.
Once you have it on you can switch between digital and analog. There are no options for analog. But digital you have a lot. For instance you can display seconds. You can flash the colon between the time, the hour, the minute, the second there. So it kind of shows the passing of time. You can do a twenty-four hour clock. So one o'clock would be thirteen and eleven o'clock at night would be twenty-three. You can have it show AM or PM as well. So you can highly customize that.
You can also change what date is shown. To have the day of the week shown or not and the date shown or not. So you can go back and forth between all of those to figure that out.
You also have the option here to Announce the Time which will speak it. So you can have it say on the hour. Customize the voice and choose which voice to use to speak the time on the hour or you can do it every half hour or quarter hour as well. So that's handy if you want to keep track of your day a little more tightly.
Now if you want even more functionality you can go to third party applications. In the Mac App Store if you search for Menu Bar Clock you come up with a variety of different apps that will give you different types of clocks in the Menu Bar. You can flip through them and see what kind of functionality they provide. There are all sorts of different things. So if there is something special that you need chances are you'll find it by just looking for apps you can get in the App Store.
It is a good idea to have the time announced to remind yourself to look away from your computer to rest your eyes and stand up and stretch.