Use These 5 Techniques To Become a Mac Pro

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. In this episode let me show you the five tricks that Mac pros use to unleash the power of macOS and their apps.

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So people often ask me how do I get as good as you at using Macs. Well, there are several techniques that I could show you that can make you a Mac pro as well. First let's start off by looking at Context Menu. Context menus as the key to figuring out what you can do with any object whether it's a file, a piece of text, part of an image, whatever. 

Now if you don't know what I mean by a Context menu you may know it by the menu that comes up when you right click, or Control click, on any object. So, for instance, I'm going to hold the Control key down and Control click on this file. You can see all the different things I can do with this file. You'll see a different Context menu depending upon what you're clicking on. That's why it's called a Context menu. So if I Control click on a folder I'll get slightly different options. If I Control click on the background of this Finder window I get different options there. I can Control click on an event in the calendar to get options for that event. I can Control click on an object, like say an image in Pages here, to get things I can do with that image. In the Browser I can Control click on a link and get things I can do with that link.

Whenever you need to do something with something you see on the screen try Control clicking on it. There are many variations to Control clicking. If you go into System Preferences and to either Mouse or Trackpad and look for Secondary click and here you can set it. So, for instance, for Trackpad by default it's Click or tap with two fingers. But you can also set it to the right corner. You also have options like this on the Apple mouse as well.

So when you want to learn how to use an app the key to doing that is looking at the Menu Bar. Looking at each menu and seeing what the items are there. For instance in an app like Pages, if you want to become an expert at it, take the time to go through all of the menus. Look through every single submenu. If you don't know what something does try it out. Use a test document to play around with all of the different commands that you see in the Menu Bar. Do this when you first get an app and want to learn how to use it or if there's an app that you've been using for awhile and you feel like you could be more of an expert at it, try going through all of the different menu items.

So now that you've looked through all the different menus you would think you know everything that an app can do. But there is one trick that you can use to reveal all sorts of new menu items. Sometimes these are exactly what you're looking for. The trick I'm referring to is simply holding down the Option key while looking at a menu. So, for instance, in the Finder I see all these different commands here in the File menu. But if I hold the Option key down I get new options for some of them. For instance Open changes to Open a New Window and Close. Quick Look changes to Slideshow. Move to Trash changes to Delete Immediately.

One of the best examples of this is if you're looking for the Save As command that used to exist years ago in apps on the Mac. It actually never went away. If you go into File and hold the Option key down, notice the Duplicate function, Shift Command S, changes to Save As, Option Shift Command S. 

Now one of the keys to using your Mac to the fullest is to understand the power of Drag and Drop. Drag and Drop is particularly useful for getting apps to interact with each other. A lot of times Mac users get stuck thinking it's impossible to do something when in fact it's as easy as just dragging from one app to another. So, for instance, say you want to import an image from a file into a Pages document. There's no need to fumble around trying to find the right menu item. Just have a Finder window open and your Pages document and drag and drop from one to the other. 

You can also do this to get photos from your Photos app into Pages. So you have Photos window open here and you drag and drop right from the Photos app into Pages. That works as well. You can also do this with Mail. You're composing a message and you decide you want to bring an image from Photos into your Mail message. Just drag and drop from Photos or from a file into Mail. It works in lots of other cases as well. Like, for instance, if I double click on this text document it will open up in TextEdit. But if I want it to open up in Pages I can drag and drop the file into the Dock here, into Pages, and now it will open that as a Pages document instead.

Finally I want to show you ways so you can customize things to unlock more power. You can do this with Toolbars in Windows. Also Sidebars and the Dock. So here I've got a Finder window and I've got these buttons in the Toolbar. You can customize those. Just go to View, Customize Toolbar, or Control click on an empty space in the Toolbar and choose Customize Toolbar. Then you get all these additional options here some of which may be very useful to you. For instance if you want to have a Delete button there you can drag that up into the Toolbar. You can drag a Get Info button. You can drag this very useful Path button there as well. You can rearrange these as much as you want and then you can use these buttons.

For instance if I wanted to see the Path and go up to a higher level I can use this button. If I wanted to select a file and put it right in the Trash I can use this button or click this button to get Info. You can always go back and customize again and get the default set back by dragging the default set here at the bottom up to the top. You can even do some interesting things like in the Finder toolbar I can open up another Finder window and find a folder or a file and drag that into the toolbar as well. You have to be editing the toolbar in one window to be able to do that. So now that folder is there. I hit Done and now if I hit that folder it will take me to that folder. Also I can drag and drop things into it. Of course you can use the Sidebar for that as well. You can drag items over here into Favorites and have the folders that you access the most here. You can access them quickly by clicking on them or drag items into them.

You can customize the Toolbar in almost any app. So here I am in Pages. I'll Control click here, Customize Toolbar, and find all these different buttons I can put in my Pages toolbar. It works with just about any app. You can also customize the Dock adding folders that you access very often on the right side here. You can drag a folder, add it to the right and now you have another place where you could see your files, you can drag things into there, you can even change how these look. Control click on them and you can select Fan, Grid, or List view. You can also put files that you have to access all the time in there. So you can put a file that's maybe a daily log file that you need to write to everyday right here in the Dock. You can click on it and it opens up that document in it's default app instantly.

So the common theme here is curiosity. If you want to learn how to get things done on your Mac take the time to be curious. Create test documents and play around with different menu commands, dragging and dropping different things, Control clicking on different elements. Set aside some time to simply explore and you'll find you'll learn things that then you can use later on when you're doing your work.