Macs are great for a variety of tasks, from office work to creative projects. In this article, we will share some handy macOS tips and tricks that will make your macOS experience even more productive. From finding hidden features to optimizing your computer for speed, we will have something for everyone. So whether you’re a novice or an expert, read on for some helpful advice.
Table of Contents
1. Stacks:
If you find your desktop pretty filthy. But if you right-click on my desktop and click use stacks, you can see that’s going to clean it up quite a bit. Actually it arranges the type of files in a proper manner. If you click on one of these stacks, it’s going to drop it down and have access to everything on the desktop.
2. The Finder Tabs:
Just like Safari or your Internet browser, you can actually open up tabs inside the same Finder window. So on your keyboard, hold down the command + T key, and if you do that twice you can open up several tabs. For example, in the Downloads folder and then need to come into a folder have on the desktop. you can very easily come into the Downloads folder, copy this particular PDF, and then just paste it. Just in the exact same finder window the entire time.
Now while we’re still in the Finder window, not sure if this is an update in macOS Monterey, which is the newest version of Mac OS, but if you go to three dots and then you come to show view options, you actually have the option to increase the icon size. And as you can see there, that’s going to increase that little icon off to the left this is really handy for photos and videos and things like that because you don’t have to use the icon view, you can actually switch to lists but still get a relatively good and decent sized preview of the file.
3. Show Folder Hierarchy:
Another really helpful shortcut I found when navigating finder is if you hold the option key, as you can see there, it’s actually popped up the folder path for a particular folder and now see exactly where can instantly switch back to the origin of a particular folder.
4. Folder Swap:
if we go more forwards into a particular folder structure and hold down the option key, if you Hover my mouse down and hold the shift button and then click on a particular folder, it instantly switches between all of the folders in that particular directory. If you come forward to the minimalism wallpaper pack, for example, and click that, you have access to all of these folders and can just click designs, that’s going to take you straight to that particular folder and everything inside it. So again, that is holding down the option and then hovering your mouse over, holding down Shift, clicking on a particular folder and that just allows you to instantly switch between them.
5. Go to Folder Window:
If you want to navigate to a particular Finder path and you know that path. If you click Shift + command + G on your keyboard, that’s going to bring up a window where you can actually just type in the folders or the paths that you want to go to. So for example, if you want to look in my Nas, this is actually going to give me a drop-down of all the folders inside my Nas. Navigate with the arrow keys from the keyboard and if you press the right arrow key on videos, for example, it’s going to bring me further across this particular path. If you go down to, let’s say, for example, pending, press the right arrow key on the keyboard again, it’s going to bring me to the pending folder. Hit the return key, it’s going to bring directly to that folder with a couple of taps of the keyboard.
6. Live Text:
This is actually an app. You are probably familiar with the Live Text feature that was introduced in macOS Monterey. Essentially, it allows you to copy text from photos or PDFs like this, but it does have some limitations. For example, you can’t copy text from protected PDFs, restricted websites, or even ebooks. And also, if you’re running an older Mac, you might not be able to update Mac OS to Monterey in the first place.
So to give you a better example of some of the limitations of Live Text, if you just copy a particular PDF document that has been scanned onto the computer, you can see that Live Text will highlight the text, but it doesn’t get certain words like such a and the least estimation. There’s a lot of different stuff that doesn’t pick up. You’ll also notice that it’s copied just everything on the page. If you copy this by pressing command + C, and paste it into the notes, it doesn’t look very good at all. There are a lot of line breaks, and a lot of text missing. It’s been all over the place.
7. Instantly Convert Images:
You have an image and you need to send this image to someone via email or the particular format that image was taken in is not compatible with a certain program. So let’s say, for example, you have a scan. This is just the scan we were looking at before. Right now it is a PNG. Right-click on this and go to quick actions and convert the image.This is going to give me a number of different options so change the format from, for example, HEIF to PNG or JPEG to PNG also you can decrease the image size. You have a number of different options to reduce this bias.
macOS is a great operating system that offers an immersive interface, quick and seamless performance, and plenty of features to make your computing experience more convenient. In this blog, we shared some tips and tricks for macOS that will make your everyday work easier. Keep an eye out for more updates in the near future!
