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.

Column View

Many people opt to use Column View when using a Mac these days. That has been a part of OS X from early on and it seems to be a favorite for many folks. However, in Column View, the names of files and folders are often shortened and become difficult to read.

In versions of OS X, it is easy enough to click on the "handle" (the two small bars) at the bottom of the scroll bar in a Finder window and dragging the column wider so you can read the file. You could double-click on the handle and the column would automatically resize to fit the longest title. Or you could hold down the Option key and drag the handle to make all the columns change size at the same time.

However, as OS X has developed, more options have been incorporated for controlling the Column View.

As you can see in the photo, there are new options available. Now, if you Control-click (or right-click) on the handle, you'll get three new options. You can make the column you are clicking on move to a size that shows the longest name, make all columns resize to the longest name in each individual column, or make them all resize equally to the longest name in all the columns.

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.