Opening Documents - more options than you might think

Most of us open documents in the exact same way...we double-click on the document icon. That is the easiest and quickest way to open a single item.

But what happens when you want to open several documents? You could double-click on each one individually, but it takes a bit longer that way. You've got a couple of shortcuts to make opening those documents quick and easy.

One option is to command-click once on each document icon. Once you've got all your items selected, just click on one and drag the entire group of selected documents onto the Application icon down on your Dock. The application will pop open and all the documents will open on your screen.

But what if you want to open more than one document and they aren't all going to open in the same application? For instance, I sometimes want to open a graphic image in Preview and a Word document in Word so that I can import that graphic into my document. I can command-click on the two document icons, and then click command-O on the keyboard. That will open both Preview and Microsoft Word and open both documents on the desktop.

These shortcuts may not seem like huge time savers. But over time, the more shortcuts and tricks you know, the faster and more efficient your work becomes.