Questions New Mac Users Have When Switching From Windows

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today I'm going to answer some common questions that Windows users have when switching to the Mac.

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So Windows and Mac are fundamentally different in many ways. When somebody switches from using a Windows computer over to using a Mac some of the skills they've learned don't translate. A lot of times what's obvious to a longtime Mac user can be very frustrating for a new user switching from Windows. Let's look at some of the most common things that confuse new Mac users.

So first let's start by talking about the keyboard. On Windows the most common keyboard shortcuts use the Control key, like Control S to save. On the Mac it's similar but it's confusing because there is a Control key on the Mac keyboard as well. But the common keyboard shortcuts use the Command key. So it's Command S to save. A lot of keyboard shortcuts are the same between Windows and Macs except it's the Command key on the Mac instead of the Control key. You can tell on the keyboard the Command key is the larger key to it's easy to remember. 

Also when you look in the Menu Bar you'll see Keyboard Shortcuts listed next to the command. You'll see that symbol there next to the keyboard shortcut. That is the same symbol that's on the Command key on the keyboard. When you see that symbol and you actually want to speak the command you would just say Command S, so Save is Command S. 

Windows users also have an Alt key. On the Mac the equivalent is the Option key. In fact some older Mac keyboards say Option and Alt on the same key. But more modern Mac keyboards will actually show the symbol here. You can see here the Show Properties shortcut in this particular app is Option Command P. A question I hear is whether or not these modifier keys, like Command and Control and Option, are the same whether they are on the left or the right side of the spacebar. For the most part, in most apps, they are exactly the same. Some special apps, like maybe games or really high end graphics apps, they may do slightly different things. But for most apps they're exactly the same no matter which one you press.

Now I've written dozens of books and millions of words of text in my life and I've never had to forward delete. But it is something that Windows users do and then they are confused when they don't see a key for forward delete on the keyboard. You can do it though using the Delete key as long as you hold the fn key down at the same time. So Delete regularly does that but if I hold the fn key down at the same time it will delete forward.

Now Windows users are used to right clicking to bring up a context menu. You can do the same thing on the Mac. If you have a trackpad typically you click but with two fingers instead of one and it brings up the context menu. Just like right clicking will in Windows. You could do the same thing on an Apple mouse but usually, depending on how you have it configured, you could also right click on a mouse as well. Another great way to bring up the context menu is Control, holding the Control key down, and clicking with one finger on a mouse or trackpad. I like that method because no matter how you've set your preferences that will always work to bring up the context menu.

Now those that switch from Windows to Mac often note that the trackpad works far better on the Mac than it does on Windows. Apple uses really high quality large very sensitive trackpads and there's a whole bunch of gestures that you could assign that make using your Mac easier. If you go to the Apple Menu and the System Preferences and then you click on Trackpad not only will you be able to customize it but you can go through three different types of gestures here. You can look at each gesture and as you move your cursor over each one you get a demonstration on the right of what it does. I encourage new Mac users to go through all of these and learn these gestures because they really make using your Mac a lot easier. 

Now the Menu Bar on the Mac is different than menus on Windows. Notice it is always at the top of the screen. There's only one instead of being a menu bar for each individual window. The Menu Bar will show you an Apple Menu to the left. This gives you system controls like sleep, shut down, lock, going to system preferences. The very next menu will always have the name of the application that is the front most application. In this case the Finder. But if I switch to TextEdit, you see now it says TextEdit. So you can always tell which app you're currently using if you look here. All the other menus will change depending upon not only the app but the window you have selected. You can go through each of these menus and notice some of them go deeper down to submenus as well. 

You can see keyboard shortcuts next to any menu items that have keyboard shortcuts. Also if you're looking for a menu command and you can't quite find it you can always go to the Help menu here. Click on that and then you'll see Search. You'll think Search is for searching help. Which it is. But it also will give you menu commands. For instance if I were to look for the superscript command I can type super and you can see it finds it. If I move the cursor over it it will actually even show me that it's in Font, and then under Baseline, and then superscript. Then I could also just click it here to actually use that command. I don't have to go to the menu to use it.

So you saw before I was using the app called Finder. Finder is the equivalent to Windows Explorer. In Finder you can go to File, New Finder Window, and this basically gives you a way to navigate through all of your files and folders on your Mac. A few things you should know about the Finder window. First you've got a sidebar and some status bars down here. I recommend you turn these all on. So under View make sure you Show Sidebar. Make sure that you Show Path Bar, and Show Status Bar. This will give you all this information at the bottom. A lot of times Window users are looking for this information and can't understand why it's not there. 

There are also four main ways to view files. This is the Icon View. Then there's the List View which allows you to sort based on columns. You can open up folders by clicking on the little triangle next to it. Then there's Column View which allows you to view each level in a different column. Like that. There's Gallery View which is useful for viewing a folder full of images. You can easily flip through them and view them. If you want to Preview anything like say a file you can do that using View and you have the Preview here. It's shown but if it was hidden it would say Show Preview here. You see this preview on the right side. It works in any mode. So you can go into Icon View here, go View and then Show Preview and I'll see a preview of whatever file I've selected. 

But also you can just hit the spacebar or alternatively Command Y to bring up Quick Look. So I hit the spacebar there and it brings up a very large window that shows me a preview of the image or other type of file. It could be a word processing document, like this one, and the spacebar will show me a nice big preview of that as well. Just hit the spacebar again to close it.

You can drag and drop to move files. So I can open up a second Finder window and then drag and drop a file between one to the other to move. But you can also copy and paste just like you can on Windows. But there is one fundamental difference. If I were to select a file and I can go to Edit and Copy but notice I can't Cut the file. Instead it works the opposite way on the Mac. You would Copy whether or not you wanted to copy the file or cut the file. It leaves the file there for now. Then you can go to another location. So I'm going to Command click here and then select this folder to go up a level. If I wanted to Paste it in here I could do Edit, Paste Item and it would make a copy of that item here. But if I hold the Option key down notice how the menu changes. That's without Option. This is with Option. There's Move Item Here. That's the equivalent to cut is to Copy and then Option Paste will move the item. It's the same thing as cutting and pasting on Windows. 

Sometimes you get alternative menu commands if you hold down the Option key. So, for instance, I go to File and I won't see a Save As command. But if I hold the Option key down notice Duplicate turns to Save As.

Now getting to your apps is different on the Mac as it is on Windows. You've got something called the Dock at the bottom of the screen. Either you have the Dock set to Alway be visible or it will popup when you move your cursor to the bottom. Here you'll have your main apps and to launch one of them you just click on the app. You can remove an app that you don't use a lot by clicking and dragging it towards the top of the screen until it says Remove and then releasing. If you want to add an app to the Dock all you need to do is go into the Finder to a New Finder Window and then do Go and Applications. Then you'll see all the applications that you've got. then you'll see all the Applications that you've got. If there's something that you want to put in the Dock all you need to do is drag it from there to the Dock and add it. It still is in the Applications folder. That's where applications always reside. But now you have a shortcut in the Dock to be able to launch that application.

Another way to launch applications is to click this Icon here which is Launchpad which takes you to a view that shows you all of your apps as icons. You can swipe with two fingers on the trackpad or the Apple mouse to go through the different screens or click on one of these dots to go through the screens. You can search for an app here by starting to type a letter and it will narrow it down and then click on any app to launch it.

So one thing that confuses a lot of Windows users when switching to Mac is they think the red button here should quit the app. But in fact that's not what it does on the Mac. What it does on Mac is it closes that window. So notice here I'm in the app called TextEdit and I have two TextEdit windows open. I'm working on two separate documents. If I were to select this one and click the red button you wouldn't want it to quit the app because that would mean closing this window as well. All clicking the red button does is close that one window with that one document. If I go to this window then and click it there it stays consistent. It doesn't quit the app. Notice the app is still running here there just aren't any TextEdit windows open now.

Now the keyboard shortcut for closing windows on Windows is Alt F4. On the Mac if you wanted to close the window I showed you there you can just click the red button but the keyboard shortcut for that is Command W. As a matter of fact you go to File and you look at Close you'll see Command W there. That will close the current window or current tab if you're using tabs. Say in Safari you have several tabs open. Command W will close the current tab. 

So how do you quit an app. Well you go here to the menu bar and the menu name for that app. You select Quit or use Command Q. But you don't normally have to do that for a lot of apps. Unless it's an app that you're going to use once and not use it again for the rest of the day then it's easier just to Hide the window. You can see Hide TextEdit is Command H. That will Hide all windows. So if I have two windows open here in TextEdit and I'm working on them and I want to get them out of the way for awhile I can do Command H or Hide TextEdit and you could think of it as being quit although it's ready to spring into action. All you need to do is find it in the Dock, click it, and it instantly  appears with everything just as you left it. 

A lot of times Windows users will want to use this Minimize button here to minimize a window. That just adds it here to the Dock. It's actually not something you'd want to use very often on Mac at all. Most of the time when you're thinking of hitting that yellow button instead use Command H to simply Hide all the windows. 

What about Scroll Bars? Here I have more text than can fit in this window yet I don't see any scroll bars on the right at all. How do you scroll? Well on the trackpad or Apple mouse you use two fingers and scroll up and down. You can see when I do that I do get a scroll bar on the right. In fact if I stop scrolling the scroll bar goes away but after a few seconds. If instead if I'm scrolling and I move my cursor over to the side the scroll bar remains there and I can click and drag it or click below it or above to scroll. If I want to I can actually go to System Preferences and make the scroll bar permanent. But I would recommend getting used to having the scroll bar not being there when you don't need it so you have full use of the window without the scroll bar getting in the way. So you use two fingers to scroll instead.

I hope you found this useful. If you just switched from Windows to the Mac and you have some questions please ask them in the comments below and I'll try to help.