Use these quick tips to make using your Mac even easier.
Quick access to Spotlight
You’ve probably seen the magnifying glass in your Mac’s menu bar. Clicking this menu item opens Spotlight, which is useful for finding files or and even launching applications. To get to Spotlight even faster, press command-space on your keyboard, and the Spotlight search bar will helpfully display.
Spotlight Calculator
Now that you know that pressing command-space will take you to Spotlight, you might also be interested to know that you can also use Spotlight to do math. Type in your problem (use * for multiply and / for divide) and Spotlight will solve it.
Focused Screenshots
You might already know that pressing Command-Shift-3 on your keyboard will save an image of exactly what is on your screen. To narrow down what you capture in that image, press Command-Shift-4 instead. Click and drag with the crosshair cursor that appears to capture whatever you drag across. Or, hit the spacebar to get a camera cursor and use it to capture individual windows.
Quick switching
Switch quickly between open applications using Command-Tab. If you have multiple windows open in an application, you can quickly switch between them using Command and the tilde key (~). Really, it’s command-` (back-tick), don’t hold the Shift key!
Built-in password management
If you use Safari, you probably already use Keychain. Any website with username and password fields will offer to save them for you for future use. Keychain also saves wi-fi passwords, email passwords, and more. But what if you have forgotten one of those passwords? Open the Keychain Access app, and you can look up passwords. Simply search for the name of your wifi or email address, check the ‘show password’ box and enter your Mac’s main password to display the password.
Sign documents in Preview
Preview is the default PDF and image viewer for Mac OS X. If you’ve ever gotten a PDF that you needed to sign and return, you may have printed it, signed it, and then scanned it again to send back. As it turns out, you can save your signature into Preview, and then use that to sign documents electronically. To save a signature, sign a piece of paper, and choose Tools->Annotate->Signature->Manage Signatures… You will be promoted to hold your signature up to your Mac’s Eyesight camera to save it. Once your signature is saved, you can add it to any document you choose.
The handy Help menu
Almost every Mac application includes a Help menu. If you find you can’t quite remember where a particular menu is located, just start typing its name in to the Search field in the Help menu, and any matching menu items will appear. Hover over one, and your Mac will remind you where to find it in that particular app’s menu system.
Hopefully you find these tips helpful. We hope they save you a bit of time or headache today.
The Apple Writer 
One Reply to “”