MacMost: Video Podcast

There are many ways to select portions of text on a Mac. If you use your Mac to write, you should learn the keyboard techniques you need to select characters, words, lines and paragraphs.

Here are some fun things to try in the Messages app on your iPhone or iPad. You can send messages with special effects, send special links, respond with a reaction instead of a new message, easily include GIFs or stickers, add subject lines, send audio recordings, and so much more.

A new action in Shortcuts for Mac allows you to add a row of data to a Numbers spreadsheet. You can prompt for information and then record a time and some data. Numbers version 12 is required. An older technique allows you to change existing data in a Numbers spreadsheet.

The FN or Globe key on your Mac keyboard can be used to switch between special feature and F-keys, change what is shown on a Touch Bar, or can also be a used by itself to bring up the Emoji and Symbol Viewer, change Input Source, or start dictation.

When you sell, donate or recycle a Mac, you should absolutely erase your drive before it leaves your possession. With older Macs that use spinning hard disk drives, you should secure erase it. But for newer Macs with solid-state drives you can't secure erase and it really isn't necessary. In most cases your old data was encrypted anyway.

Creating good spreadsheets isn't just about getting the formulas right. By adding some text and design elements you can make it clear to someone else, or yourself in the future, what to do to use the spreadsheet and understand how it works.

When text is too small to read or you want to enlarge an area of your iPhone or iPad's screen, you can use the Accessibility feature Zoom. There are a lot of options to help you position the zoom area, change magnification, and even speak text on the screen.

Most apps you use to create documents on your Mac have the same core commands in the File menu. Learn how to use New, Open, Close, Save, Duplicate, Save As, Rename and Move To. Plus, lots and lots of useful tips and tricks!

A common problem is finding that you are suddeny missing contacts, notes, calendar events or email messages on your Mac, iPhone or iPad. It could just be that you are looking only at a specific account or subgroup of those items in that app. Here's how to switch back to viewing all entries.

If you have difficulty dragging and dropping with a trackpad on your Mac, here are some suggestions. Note that you can drag with one finger or two, so try the both methods. You can also use double-tapping to start a drag, and Drag Lock. Three-finger drag is another option. There are also ways to move things without using drag-and-drop at all.

While it may not seem like you can use wildcards in a Spotlight search on a Mac, you can use a variety of options to get the same result with a normal search, and then regular wildcard searches when using Raw Query as your search type.

You can create, view, mark up, merge and split PDF documents on an iPhone and iPad with no special apps needed. If you know where to look, you can do almost everything in the Files app, but the Books app may be the better way to view PDFs.

If you want to report something directly to Apple, here are 10 links that will let you send them information. You can make a suggestion, report a problem with an app or content, and much more.

Learn how to properly take a screenshot, mark it up, and share it with others. Learn how to avoid three common mistakes people make when doing this and how to best share a screenshot instead of sending a large email attachment.

You can animate charts in Keynote, showing how data changes over time. If you use animated Bubble Charts in the right way, you can end up with some interesting results.

You can use the Shortcuts app on your Mac to create quick text inserts or replacements. The Shortcut can prompt for text, let you choose from a list, or include the current date and time.

Learn how to properly review a Pages document using change tracking and comments. Multiple people can make editing suggestions that can then be accepted, rejected or modified by the author or lead editor. But these features can also come in handy if you are writing alone.

Drag-and-drop is a basic Mac skill, but there are many advanced techniques that most users don't know about. Learn how to use drag-and-drop with multiple desktops, the App Switcher, text selections, URLs, and even between Macs with Universal Control.

If your iPhone's battery seems to run down quickly, use the Settings app to figure out which app is the culprit. You can see yoru battery use by app, by day and even by hour.

When buying an app in the App Store on the iPhone, iPad or Mac, it can be hard to judge which apps are worth it. Here are some ways to quickly assess an app based on the information shown in the App Store and elsewhere.