Top 10 Things Users Don’t Know They Can Do On Their Mac

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are 10 things that a lot of people don't know that you can do on your Mac. So I often include various tips in my tutorials and often I get comments from people that say that they didn't realize that they could do that particular thing on their Mac. I keep track of these and here are the ones where I hear that the most. So first, you can copy and paste to move files on your Mac. I hear this a lot from Windows users who do it with a simple Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V. On the Mac, it doesn't appear you can do that at first. You got to know the trick. So you can select a file like this in a folder and you can use Edit, Copy or Command-C to start. Then you go somewhere else like this. And now if you want to move it here, it doesn't look like you can do it. You go to Edit and if you paste, it actually will make a copy of the item here. So the original is still in the other folder. All you need to do is hold the Option key and this changes to Move Item here. So it's not Command-V, it's Option-Command-V to move. Now sometimes when you copy text like this text here on a web page and then you're going to paste it into another app like Mail or Pages or somewhere else, you'll get all of the formatting with the text. You can see this is bold here and there's coloring and all of that. It even takes the font and the size. But if you want to paste without that styling, you could do it. Just look in the Edit menu and you usually see here Paste and Match Style. This is the equivalent to making the text plain text and then pasting it. So you can see here there's usually a keyboard shortcut. Often it's Option-Shift-Command-V. Sometimes it's something different. So you want to check depending on the app. And when I paste in here, it retains the style that I was using here in this app and it gets rid of all the other formatting. By the way, if you find these videos valuable, consider joining the more than 2,000 others that support MacMost at Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You could read about it at macmost.com slash Patreon. Now years ago, a common thing to do when you were working with a document was to use Save As to save a copy out as a different file name and continue working on that file. But years ago, Apple got rid of that. If you go to the File menu, there's no Save As. A substitute for that is Duplicate. And you could certainly use Duplicate to do this, but it works a little differently, leaving both documents open. However, most people don't know that you can simply hold the Option key down and in almost all apps, Duplicate changes to Save As. And you can use the old Save As command if you prefer that. I often hear from people that say that it's hard to preview an image in the Finder on the Mac before opening a file. That if they want to find an image, the icon's often too small and it's cumbersome to open up an image, close it, and continue to do that. But you can use Quick Look to quickly preview images. All you need to do is select the image and hit the spacebar. And you get this Quick Look window here that gives you a preview. Press the spacebar again and it goes away. There's lots of functionality in here, including the ability to resize it. And you don't have to dismiss it. You can select another image and it will show that in the Quick Look window. As a matter of fact, you can use the arrow keys to navigate around and quickly look through a whole bunch of different images. Another option, by the way, is using View and then Show Preview. And then you get a larger preview here on the right side of the Finder window. And you can hide it the same way. Here's one that every time I mention it, there are some people that didn't realize that they could do this on their Mac. You could sign PDFs. If you double-click PDF, it opens up in Preview by default, which is on your Mac. You don't need to download additional software. And if there's an area to sign here, you can sign it using the markup tools. So you could click here. You could also use this form-filling toolbar as well. Both of them have this little signature button here. Click that and you can create a new signature or use one you've already created. Then you click there and it puts your signature there. You can move it to where you want, resize it, and place it. And then you can save this and then send it along to whoever wanted the signature. You could also, of course, fill out the form by clicking on fields that are there. And if the field, for some reason, isn't there, if there's no way to fill it in, you could still use markup tools. Click here to add text and then resize this text to make it the appropriate size and color and place it where you want. If you need to often type the same thing over and over again, you can make a shortcut for it. So let's say you need to type this, and you're sick and tired of having to type this two or three times a day. So I'm going to copy it here and then go to system settings and then look for keyboard on the left. Then look for the button called text replacements. And here you could add text replacements to replace something you type with something else. So I'm going to click the plus button to add something. It's useful to always use something you would never accidentally type. So for instance, I'm going to do exclamation point and later. And then with you could type anything you want here or paste in that text that I had before. Click add. And now if I want to type this, I don't need to take the whole thing out. I just take the replacement and then either space or return. And it inserts the entire thing. You can put in tons of text in the width area or just something simple like a quick emoji. And then you just type this to get that emoji instead of having to find it each time. Many people don't realize that there's a batch renaming tool built into the Finder. You're not going to find it if you search through the menus looking for batch rename. Instead, select all of the files that you want to rename. I use command A to select everything here and then go to file rename, which is what you would use to rename a single file. But with multiple files selected, you get this whole tool here. You can replace text in all of the file names. You can add text before or after all the file names. And you can format. So you could use something like the name and date. And you can specify the name here or the name and counter name and index. So you could do something like this. And let's have a number start at 100 and maybe the word photo with space like that. You can rename everything like that. And if the results aren't what you want, you can always use edit undo to change them all back as long as you do it right afterwards. So you probably know that you can use an emoji character by using control command and space to bring up the emoji and special character viewer. You could also use FN and E to bring that up. If you've got a word here that triggers an emoji like this, for instance, using these will actually bring up this first, allowing you to choose an emoji based on that last word. But you can simply click here to go to the full view. Now, I'm amazed by how many people know that you can do this, but then they're browsing for their emoji or special character. Instead, use search here, you can search for a term, and it will narrow things down or get to the specific one that you want. Sometimes you have to try various different terms, like for instance, smile will produce different results than happy. And this works for more than just emoji characters. For instance, you need an arrow search for arrows, and it comes up with all sorts of different arrow characters that you can use. If you want to control exactly what's shown here, click here, and then use this button that's at the end of this list at the bottom. And then you go into the character viewer. Now a character viewer, you can customize exactly which characters are available. So you can turn on as many as you want to get back to the emoji and special character viewer, click the same button here. Now it's at the top right, and it goes back into this mode. So the next time you bring it up, you're back to using it like this. One thing that's been around for a long time, but some people still don't know about it is Hot Corners. It's a good alternative to keyboard shortcuts and gestures. Go to the Apple menu and then system settings, then go to desktop and dock. At the bottom, it's a button called Hot Corners. Now you can assign a special command to any corner of your screen. So let's use the top right corner. You could set it to any one of these, like activate mission control or a launch pad, or lock the screen, which is very useful. I'll set it to launch pad. And now when I move my pointer to the top right corner, it brings up launch pad. If you find you trigger it too easily, you can actually assign one of these while holding a modifier key, like the command, option, control, or shift key. And when you do that, you can see it changes to command launch pad. Now it won't work by itself. I have to hold the command key down and move to the top right corner to trigger it. And finally, I'll end with what might be the best one of them all, universal clipboard. If you've got a Mac and say an iPhone or an iPad or a second Mac, you can copy and paste between all your devices effortlessly. It just works. There are some requirements. I may want to check those out if it's not working for you. But for instance, I'm going to copy some text here on my iPhone and then I'm going to go on my Mac and paste. And you'll see it pastes exactly what I copied. And it works the other way as well. It works with images as well. So here I'm going to copy a photo on my iPhone and then I'm going to paste here on my Mac. And you can see it pastes that image. I don't have to mess with transferring the file or anything like that. Just copy and paste from one to the other. So these are not only things that people are often surprised that they can do on their Mac, but they're all also very useful. Thanks for watching. Click the Thumbs Up button below to let me know.