Tips and Tricks To Master the Mac Save Dialog

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me show you how to master the Save dialog on your Mac.

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Now whenever you create a document in any application or to save some content that you're viewing you are going to encounter a Save dialog. This is what comes up when you choose File, Save or Command S for the first time. So here I am in TextEdit, for instance, and I've just typed some text. I'm going to save for the first time. So I to File, Save or Command S and I'm presented with the Save dialog. Now there's a lot of functionality here. Let's dig into it.

The first thing is there are two modes of Save dialog. This is the simpler mode. You have an expanded mode that you get when you click on this button right here. Click that and you get the full Save dialog. For most people in most situations you want to see this all the time. The smaller view only gives you a few options. So having the larger view is preferred. Once you switch to this view you should see it every time you go to save a document in that application.

So most Save dialogs look pretty similar. You've got the file name here at the top after Save As. The main point of the Save dialog is to select a name for your file, a location to save it, and then to Save it with the Save button here. Selecting a location means navigating through your folders on your hard drive or in iCloud. You'll see what looks like a finder window here. It basically is a finder window. You can navigate around to whatever folder that you want. 

So the first tip I want to show you is that you've got a sidebar here that's the same as the Finder sidebar. So if you've added anything to Favorites it will appear here. This is very handy if you've added a favorite here like say this Project A folder. I can simply click it and it will jump to the Project A folder. You can also scroll through this list here and see other locations. You can see things in iCloud. You can see Attached Drives. If one of these looks empty notice if I move my cursor over something like iCloud you'll see a Hide or Show here on the right. It's invisible if I don't have my cursor there. But if I move my cursor there I can click it and I can Hide or Show the entire category here. So if for some reason Favorites looks empty look for the Show button, click it, and it will reveal all of them.

Now if you don't see the sidebar at all there's a keyboard shortcut that brings it up. It's the same keyboard shortcut that you would use in the Finder. Command Option S. That will Hide or Show the sidebar. You can also click here. This is where you get a lot of options. At the top you'll see Show Sidebar. So you can use that instead of the keyboard shortcut. You also can switch to a different view. These are the same as the Finder views. Icons, Lists, and Columns. So I can go to Icons and now I have the Icon View. List will give me a list here and I can even Sort by these columns. Column View gives me the Finder's Column View. You can use the keyboard shortcuts Command 1, Command 2, and Command 3 to switch between those just like you can in the Finder.

You also have the option to group items by certain things. Although most of the time you just want None chosen. But if you really wanted to group items by say Kind you can. Now in many cases in many apps you can choose to Hide or Show extensions. So here you can see the Save As name is untitled but if I uncheck that I can see the dot rtf extension there. 

Now you can create new folders in several different ways. One is to hit this New Folder button. So if I wanted to create a subfolder for Project A here I can click here and it will ask me for a name and create a new subfolder in the current location. I can also click the New Folder button, which is always at the bottom here or I can use the keyboard shortcut Shift Command N to do it.

Now you also have a Pulldown Menu here. This Pulldown Menu will show you recent places that you've saved files. It will also show you other common locations. You can use this to quickly find a location if it happens to be listed there. You can also use keyboard shortcuts to jump to locations. You could use the same keyboard shortcuts you use in the Finder. If I switch to the Finder you could see here there's a Go menu and there are all these keyboard shortcuts to go to special folder locations. For instance the Desktop is Shift Command D, the Home folder is Shift Command H. If I'm using the Save dialog I can use those same shortcuts. So Shift Command D takes me to the Desktop and Shift Command H takes me to my Home folder. You can also use the Finder shortcut Command up arrow to go up a level.

Once you're navigating around in here and you have something selected you can go and use the arrow keys, like the right arrow, to navigate around. So here in Column View it makes the most sense. I can navigate into my Home folder, into my Documents folder, and down. I can go to the left, to move up, and I can use the up and down arrows to go through the list. It'll work a little differently depending upon the view. So if you're in Icon View I can select this folder. I can double click it to go in. I can do Command up arrow to go up and back out. If I have a bunch of folders here I can select one and then use the arrow keys to navigate around in them. Then I can use Command down arrow to actually jump inside.

You also have these Back and Forward buttons that work like browser buttons. So I can go back to the last location that I was looking at and continue to go back or forward to navigate around as I'm trying to find the right location to save this file. Now a really cool thing that you can do is you can click on an existing file here, you see these are all grayed out because there are not in a location that I can save the file into. They are an existing file. But if I find the file name I want to use I can actually click on a file to set that to my current file name minus the extension. So, for instance, here I had an image. Say this text file goes with that image. I can click on that and you could see how it changed everything before the file extension to match what's there. I use this all the time as I'll save several files that have to do with a certain project using the same name but one is a text file, one is an image, ones is a video, etc.

Now you can also search for a location to save your file. So I can search usually for a folder name. I can set the location there. It's the same as searching in the Finder. I can even do things like name colon and have name matches that. I can hit the Plus button here and add more criteria for the search. The difference here is I'm not looking for a file to open. I'm looking for a folder to then go into and save this file.

You can use Command F to quickly jump to here to start a search. You can also use Shift Command G to bring up Go To The Folder which allows you to type a path. A lot of people like to use that in the Finder. You can do that in the Save dialog as well. When you go to Save a file you can also use the Tags field here. You can click in it and then select a Tag to add or you can start typing the name of the tag to add it. Now when you Save the file those tags will automatically be there in the Finder applied to that file.

Now at the bottom of the Save dialog you're going to find different options depending upon the application. Here in TextEdit with a Rich Text document all I have is File Format. I can select from different file formats that TextEdit uses. Here I am in Preview and when I go to Save I have different options at the bottom. In this case I can select a format for an image, in this case it's an image, and even the options will change depending upon what format I choose. So here I can choose jpeg and now I have a quality setting. Sometimes you won't see the options here but you'll see an  Options button. Click that and it reveals the options. It really depends on the app.

Another thing you could do is you could drag and drop a location from the Finder. So let's say I'm about to Save this TextEdit document. But I also have a Finder window open and I see all my folders here. So now when I go to Save I can bring up this Finder window and drag and drop the location into here. You can see how it changes to jump to that location. So if the Finder location happens to be just right there in another window drag and drop may be the quickest way to get to it.

Now navigating around in all this can be done with the keyboard. If you use the Tab key it will jump between things. So you can see here I have the name selected and I can start typing the name. But if I hit the Tab key it will jump to the Tags field. Hit it again and it jumps to Search. Then if I continue to hit it it will jump to different things in here. Sometimes you can't quite tell what's selected. But eventually it will come back around to the beginning. Now what gets selected depends upon a System Preference. 

if you go to System Preferences and then to Keyboard and then you look under Shortcuts there is Use Keyboard Navigation to Move Focus Between Controls. Select that and now Tab will actually select more controls. So I can go around and you could see it selecting those buttons there. I could use the Spacebar to activate any button I want. I can go through all the different controls including there's New Folder, there's Cancel, there's Save.

Now you don't need to do any of that in order to escape out of here. If you hit Command S by accident or decide you want to make more changes before saving you can simply hit the Escape key to exit here. But it doesn't always work. Sometimes if you have a certain thing selected Escape won't quite work. An alternative is Command Period. Command Period always works. That's the cancel button for a dialog like this. Command Period will exit out without saving. Of course all you need to do to Save is hit Return. So in here anytime I can hit Return. Right now it would save it as Untitled.rtf. I can type, you know, my name and hit Return and do all the saving without actually having to use the mouse or trackpad.

One last thing I want to show you is that these files, even though they are grayed out, can actually be acted on in the Save dialog. If I hold the Control key down and click on them, or use two fingers on the trackpad or an Apple mouse, I can bring up the Context Menu. I have things like Rename, and I can actually rename the file. That sometimes is really useful. Sometimes you want to save a new file there like My Novel to a location that already has an older file named My Novel. You can then rename the older file and save the new one with the name that you want. I can also Control click and Move to Trash. So if you want to get rid of something right in the middle while you're saving, maybe to use that same file name, you can do it without having to go to the Finder.

You could also always use Command R to open up a Finder window pointing to this exact location. So Command R will open up a Finder window and there Project A is selected. If you need to do more work before saving the file, rearranging files, renaming them, that kind of thing and want to do it in the Finder you can quickly jump from the Saved dialog to the Finder with Command R.

I hope this in-depth look at the Save dialog will prove useful the next time you need maximum control when saving a new document.