Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here are ten underused features of ten different Mac Apps.
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So most Mac users use a variety of different apps throughout the day. These apps are packed full
of features. Here are ten features you could be overlooking in the apps that you use all the time.
First let's start off in Safari. The most underused feature in Safari, I think,
is Reader View. So you're looking at an article like this and there are ads and navigation
elements and all sorts of things. If you want to focus on the content you can turn on Reader View
either by clicking on this icon here or you could also go to View and you have Show and
Hide Reader View here. Shift Command R is the keyboard shortcut. Now look at how nice this
is to read. Not only can you focus on the actual content of the article but you have controls right
here to increase or decrease the size, to change the background color, and the font.
So next we've got the Messages App. The feature I love to use in the Messages App that many
people don't is the Tap Back. So you get a message like this and you might respond OK or
maybe a thumbs up emoji or something like that. But if you Control Click, right click,
or two-finger click on a trackpad you can select Tap Back. Then you can select one of these.
Watch what happens when I choose the thumbs up. Instead of a
new message being sent a little thumbs up icon appears right here over the message.
That's what the other person sees as well. So instead of cluttering up the conversation
with little OK's and Sure's and Yes's and No's, you can just use these little Tap Back icons.
In Pages an often unused feature is Character Styles. Now a lot of people may know about
paragraph styles. That's when you take an entire paragraph like this. You change something about
it, like a larger font size. Then you can create a New Style based on that or redefine the current
style by updating and it updates all the rest of the text as well. Character Styles work the same
way but they don't affect entire paragraphs. Just any character you have selected. So if
you select some text like this and say let's go and make that Bold and Underline and also change
the color to something else like that. You can use that as a character style by clicking here,
adding a character style, calling it whatever you want like that, and then you can use it for
other things as well. Just select it. Go to Character Styles and choose it.
The best part about it is you can then change it, let's change it to a different color like this,
and now when I go into Character Styles here I can Update this character style with what is
selected and notice what happens to the other times I've used it. They all update as well.
So imagine having a thousand different things set to that character style and being able to change
the color or font or something else instantly for all one thousand items throughout your document.
In the Reminders App an unused feature is Indenting or Sublists.
So, for instance, I could add some items to this To Do List right here
and they could meant to be part of a single task, like Clean out work closet. So you can have some
subtasks like this and I could take these four items here. I'm going to Click to select and
then Shift Click to Select All of them. Then I'm going to drag them underneath this and then
I'm going to go to Edit and Indent or use Command and the right square bracket. This will indent
all of these under this one item which now gets bolded because it has a list of its own.
Watch what happens when I check the main item. It checks off all of the subitems as well.
Now the Calendar App is extremely useful of course. But what makes it so much more
useful to me is Sharing a Calendar. So you can take a calendar like this one.
I'm going to click right here and then Share it with other members of my family. We can all
add items to the same calendar and see what's on it. So instead of having to tell everybody about
certain events happening you just put them on the calendar. Everybody even gets notifications
about new events added and changes made. You could do the same thing with a work group,
with a group of friends, a softball team. However you want to use it.
Now in the Contacts App there's also a very underused feature and that is not actually in
the Contacts App. It's the ability to actually access all of the information you put in here
in other places. So, for instance, here I am in the Mail App. I can add new people in the
To or Cc field by simply clicking the little Plus button here. It brings up a little mini version of
the Contacts App. I can select someone here. It will list their email addresses and I can easily
add them there. The same thing in Messages. I can go New Message and then click right
here and there's that little mini version of the Contacts App again. Knowing that you've
got such easy access to your contacts give you incentive to actually go through your contacts,
clean them up, make sure all the important people that you need to
be in touch with through different apps are listed there and you can easily find them.
Now I've got to include the Finder here as well. The Finder, of course, gives you a window that
allows you to manage your files and folders. All too often I see people going and creating
multiple Finder windows like this and then maybe using them to drag and drop files back and forth
or just look at one location in one window, one location in another window. But what I like to
use instead is Tabs. You can create a new Tab in an existing Finder window with Command T
like that. Then you can have two different locations right here easily accessible. You
could also go to Window and then Merge All Windows or in a window with only one Tab like that you can
actually enable Tabs by using Show Tab Bar like that. Now you've got the Tab Bar. I can actually
drag the Tab from one window to another. So I like to use the Finder like this. If you think that
makes dragging and dropping from one location to another hard, it doesn't really. You can go grab
a file like this. Drag to the Tab. Wait and the Tab opens and you can drop it in there.
An underused feature of the Maps App is the Look Around. Now for years Goggle has had Street View
in Goggle Maps. But Apple Maps didn't have that originally. So even today a lot of people don't
realize it's there. It's mostly in cities and it's not everywhere yet but it's in more and more
places every year. So to use it I'm going to Click and Hold here until this Pin appears. Then you
could see here I've got this little Look Around window. You can see the little binoculars there.
Click there and then you go into it. You can move around like that. You can click on the ground
to move forward. It's great for really getting the lay of the land before you head to a location.
You can click here to shrink it and actually have it in a little window. Then you see the
binoculars here and you can actually drag the map around and go to a new location like that.
Preview is a great app that does a whole variety of different things with images and PDF's.
One underused feature is the ability to quickly Copy and Paste to create a new PDF that just
has the information you want. So say you got a newsletter like this and you just want to clip out
a portion of it. You could go to the Markup Tools by clicking here. Use the Selection Tool. Select
an area like this and then a quick Copy, Command C, and then File New From Clipboard. Now you have
a new PDF that just has that one little thing you need. So you don't have to save some huge PDF just
for one tiny little article or maybe if you get a multipage PDF that has a ticket on it and you
just want the little spot that actually has the ticket, not the ads and other information, you can
create your own PDF like this. After you create it just Save it and it will be this separate file.
Finally, we've got the Dictionary App which you may not use very often.
It is handy for looking up the definitions of words. But what writers will use it for a lot
more than that is the Thesaurus. Click there and you get a full Thesaurus. It's right there
on your Mac. Plus you can just quickly click on something and it will jump to another
entry. So you can jump around to find the exact right word for whatever it is you're writing.
Let me know what you think are some underused features of your favorite Mac
Apps in the Comments below. Thanks for watching.