Customizing Your Toolbars Makes Life Easier

All the applications on the Mac come with a toolbar. The row of tools spread across the top of the application window. And all those little tools come in handy. But the default choices aren't always the best choices.

For example, here is the default toolbar for the Finder on my computer...

And here is the current toolbar after I customized it...

I create a lot of new folders, so why not have a quick button for that? And I delete a lot of items and this gives me a one-click option for that, as well. Plus I am a daily user of Dropbox and this gives me quick access to my Dropbox folder. So customizing makes my work easier.

So how can you do the same? Well, some applications have a "customize" button right on the toolbar that looks like this...

But if that button isn't there, no worries. Just right-click or Option-click on a bare spot on the toolbar of an application and you'll get some options for optimizing. Here are a couple of examples of what you might see...

Customize drop down menu in Firefox

Customize drop down menu in Microsoft Word

Once you choose to customize, a window with various options will drop down. You'll see a range of buttons (don't forget to scroll for more!) and you can just drag them on and off your toolbar. You can even use the space and separator options just to help organize your toolbar for easier use. Once you are done, just click Done.

And don't worry about messing things up. There is always the option to just restore the Default toolbar.

Smart Folders Help Organize My Stuff

If you took a peek in my office, you would instantly know that I'm not a great filer. I've got a desk, a table and lots of shelves...and they all have piles on them. To my right are Equipment Acceptance Forms that should be filed. To my left, notes for an upcoming workshop and some information about working with pivot tables in Excel. Both should be filed. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

Well, the same sort of chaos used to be part of my computing life. I had hundreds of documents...all just filed in a giant folder called Documents. I also had dozens of files all over the desktop that never even made it to that vast Documents black hole. But a few minutes here and there setting up some extra folders and all that has started to take shape.

Smart Folders are tools built into OS X. And what are Smart Folders? Folders that file things for you.

What's that, you say? They file things for me? Yep, pretty much. You can still choose where you tuck a file - even that giant Documents folder. But when you want to find it later, you'll get access to it via a Smart Folder that has already organized things for you.

The trick is in setting up the folders correctly - not a difficult thing to do. And yes, you can have as many of them as you want or need.

So how is all this magic done? Rather than trying to spell it out for you, I'm going to send you here. This article will walk you step-by-step through setting up a Smart Folder.  If you give it a try and it doesn't seem to work, let me know. I'll be happy to help!

Using Math Symbols and Other Shapes When Typing

It is easy to add a lot of shapes and symbols to your work on a Mac. Just as quickly as I can type a string of letters, I can also add ∅  ➜ ☝ ♘ ÷ and others. But even though it is easy to add them, it certainly isn't easy to figure out how to add them!

The first step using these characters is to head to your System Preferences. Once you get there, open the Language & Text preference. Look for your Input Sources tab at the top. There will be slight differences in how that looks depending on which version of the operating system you are using, but it should look similar to this...

The key things you want to check for here are...
Your input methods should already have "US" checked since that is your default language.
You will want to add to that a check mark that will show the Keyboard & Character Viewer.
Make sure the box for "Show Input menu in menu bar" gets checked.
You do not need to check the Unicode Hex Input box.

Now close your Language & Text preferences and return to your Desktop.

Now you should see an American Flag up in your menu bar. That will give you access to your Character Viewer.

So go ahead, click the flag, and choose Show Character Viewer in the menu. And now you'll see something like this...

In the left-hand column, you will see a lot of different choices - Mathematical Symbols, Number Symbols, Arrows, etc. All of these can be added to any of your documents. Just click the symbol the symbol you want (above I've clicked "white sun with rays" and click the Insert button in the lower right corner. That puts the symbol where your cursor is in your document.

And you can do that as many times as you want with any symbol you like.

ADDITIONAL NOTE: If you have an older version of OS X, you may find the Character Palette checkbox in a different location. Rather than looking in the Language & Text control panel, check in the International control panel. Click on the tab for Input Menu. Then you can turn on the Character Palette.

Screen Shots

There are a lot of reasons to want to capture a snapshot of your screen. You may want to preserve something to share it with your students. You may want to send it as an e-mail attachment to a friend or co-worker. Or you may just want to save it as a prompt to your memory so you can return to it later.

No matter the reason, there are several options for you to choose.

The easiest is the built-in screen capture command on the Mac. Pressing COMMAND+SHIFT+3 will take a photo of your desktop. Couldn't be easier.

But perhaps you want to take a photo of just a portion of your desktop...what to do? Press COMMAND+SHIFT+4. Your cursor will turn into cross hairs which you can drag and select an area of the screen. When you drag and release your mouse, the photo will be taken of the selected area.

Want more options? Check in your Utilities folder for Grab. Using that application will allow you to take a photo of the desktop or a selection, just like before. But it also adds the options of taking a snapshot of a window and of taking a timed capture. The timing feature gives you a chance to arrange things on the screen including pulling down menus for the capture.

Finally, I love using Skitch for screen captures. It gives you all the options of Grab plus it allows you to edit the photos right in the software before saving them to your desktop.

Using one of these options, you should be able to grab just the screen capture you need without any problems at all.

Creating a PDF

I'm always asked to take Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, or other items and turn then into a PDF file. Well there is no mystery to this and anyone with a Mac can do it.

Just open the document and choose PRINT

When the print dialog box appears, ignore all those print commands and go right to the bottom to the PDF button.

When you click that button, you'll get a pop-up menu. The first choice is to "Save as PDF..."  Select that.

You'll be asked to title your new document. And just like magic, you too have created a PDF document!

Spotlight Tricks

We all know we can use Spotlight to locate items on our computers. Just click on the magnifying glass icon in the upper-right corner of the screen, type in the name or information about the file we want to find, and Spotlight will locate it on our hard drive.

But did you know there are other features of Spotlight?

Spotlight provides a direct link to your Dictionary and your Calculator.

If you want the definition of word, just type that word into Spotlight. Then click on the Dictionary result for the full definition.

Likewise, if you type a calculation into the Spotlight field, the result will pop right up in the Calculator result.

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.

Printing e-mail with your name as the header

Typically when we print from Entourage, our e-mail reader of choice in our school, the printed page starts with a header containing all the pertinent info about the e-mail itself.

This includes the name of the recipient who is printing, but it means sorting through some pages on the printer and reading more closely to find your stuff.

The quick solution is to have your name show up right on top.

Next time you start to print an e-mail, look for the Header check box in the Print Dialogue box. Check it.

Now when you print, your name will be right on top...just like this.

Of course, the question arises....why are you printing all those messages and wasting paper? We don't go there in this post, but we will get back to that!