- Hi, everyone.
So this video is for those of you who are brand new
to the Mac ecosystem,
or even for those of you
that have owned a Mac for a while,
but you just want to sort of streamline
the way that you use it.
And in this video
I'm going to show you some tips and tricks,
that's going to make your Mac ownership experience
even better.
Now without further ado getting straight into it.
The first thing I wanted to show you
is for those of you that use external monitors.
So you might not be able to see in the background
of this video, but I do have my M1 MacBook Air
hooked up to a Dell external display.
Now, if we actually come into the Apple logo
in the top right-hand corner, we click System Preferences
and then we go into displays.
What I'll do is I'll actually drag this
onto my external monitor
so you can see it a little bit easier.
You can see if we go to arrangement
we can obviously move all of this around.
So if you have your monitor off to the right
or off to the left, that's totally fine,
you can switch this up.
But a lot of people don't realize
that there's this little white bar here
and you can actually click and hold and drag
this little white bar onto each monitor.
And as you can see there
once we change it over to this particular monitor
it now means that we have the menu bar on this monitor,
and this is essentially our main monitor.
And this is a very helpful feature
because if you sit in front of your monitor
and you have your laptop off to the side, for example,
sometimes it's easy just to have all of these menu bars
on your main monitor that's right in front of you.
And the second feature that most of you probably know about
but I'm sure almost all of you under utilize,
is the Spotlight search.
So a quick keyboard shortcut is command and space.
That's going to bring up Spotlight search on your computer.
Now, obviously you can use this to search for files
and all that kind of stuff
within the hard drive or the SSD of your Mac.
But a lot of people don't know
that you can actually do a lot more
with this Spotlight search.
So for example, some multiplication and mathematics.
So you can see there
you can do 50 times 50 or whatever you want,
you can do subtraction.
So we also go into negatives.
You can also go somewhat more complicated
so you can start adding in brackets here
and you'll see that it'll calculate it very, very easily
with no problems.
And this has saved me probably hours over the years.
I don't have to go to my phone or open up a different app,
I literally just click Command + Space
type in my equation,
works it out for me straight away.
You can also do the same with currency.
So I live in Australia and I spend a lot of time
translating between different currencies,
mainly from Australian dollars to US dollars and vice versa.
And this just makes it super easily.
So let's say for example, someone sends me 500 US dollars.
I can just type in 500 USD
to AUD and it will do the calculation right there.
It'll take it from Yahoo finance,
so this is the most up-to-date exchange rate.
And you can see that at the moment
500 US dollars is 644 Australian dollars.
You can obviously do almost any currency you want.
So we can do 500 yen to AUD
or US dollars or great British pounds.
And it's going to do all of those calculations
right in Spotlight search for you.
The other thing I use Spotlight search for
is launching apps.
So you can literally just type in the first few letters
and then if you wanted to launch it
you literally just press return on the keyboard,
and that is going to open up the application.
It saves you a lot of time,
if you don't have it on your desktop
or it's not a frequently used app,
you don't have to go into Finder
and then search for it in the applications,
it's just right there, ready to go.
Now, a lot of people really under appreciate
the benefit of the preview application.
So if you're sent a contract or you're signing something
you need to do an e-signature,
just open up preview and you can sign it there very easily.
So let's say for example,
I'm taking a screenshot of a document
and I need to sign it and email it to someone by the way,
screenshot shortcuts is super easy on the keyboard,
Command + Shift + 3
for the entire display or four
if you want to select something.
So we'll just do Command + Shift + 4
and we'll select this part.
And if you open up that particular screenshot
or document or PDF or whatever you're using
and putting it up using preview,
you can come up here to the tools
and you can come to annotate
and then you can click signature.
And then as you can see there
I've got my own personal signature
or you can click manage signatures
if you don't have one and you can either create one
on your trackpad camera or phone.
Now this is probably easier on the phone,
but let's just do for the trackpad,
just for the purpose of this video.
If I click there to begin
you literally just sign on the trackpad
and then you just press any key when finished and then done.
And now, as you can see, I can come here,
I can click that and I can now drag that
onto any location or any PDF or file I want to on my Mac.
And when I exit out of this, and if I load it back up,
by the way, really quick preview, just to load something up
really quickly, spacebar.
Press the spacebar, you can see there
that it is now saved.
And I can now send this to my workplace
or my bank or wherever it needs to go.
Now, this next tip is something I used to use all the time
at my previous nine to five job,
and it is hot corners.
Now, some of you might find this really useful
around the house.
Let's say, for example, if you live with kids
or you have siblings and you don't want them
to be able to access your computer easily,
you can set up your hot corners to make it very easy
for you to lock the screen.
Now, coming back to system preferences
we're going to go to desktop and screensaver,
and we're going to make sure we are on the screensaver tab.
We're going to come down here
and we're going to click hot corners
and you can see
you've got a couple of different options here.
So the main one I use is lock screen.
So I'm going to set that to the bottom right hand corner.
I'm going to click, Okay.
Now, as you can see here on the trackpad
I'm going to put the mouse into the bottom right-hand corner,
and as you can see, that's going to lock the screen
and you have to enter your password
to be able to get back into it,
which is really handy, especially at work.
If you need to leave your desk for a minute or two
to grab a coffee or do something like that,
you can literally just hover your mouse
down the bottom right-hand corner
or whichever corner you choose,
it's going to lock the screen
and you can just walk away very, very easily.
Now there are other options.
So if we come back into hot corners and we say, for example,
change the top right-hand corner to mission control,
I'm going to click Okay.
If I put the mouse in the top right-hand corner,
it's going to show me the mission control,
or we can also select another one
of my personal favorites, application windows.
So now, for example, if we have multiple windows open
and we move the mouse up to the top right-hand corner
you can see there that it gives us an immediate view
of all of our open windows,
and we can come in here and we can select one if we want
but it's a very, very handy feature to have.
Now, another really cool feature is desktops.
Now this can be accessed by either pressing F3 button
or using three fingers to swipe up on your trackpad.
Now, what this allows you to do is add
multiple kinds of desktops that you can scroll through,
and this makes it really, really handy for multitasking.
So say for example, on desktop one,
if I wanted to have Apple music open,
if I now use my three fingers
to swipe across the desktop too,
I can for example, have the maps application open.
And then if I wanted to, I can come here
and I can add a third desktop by clicking the plus button up
in the top right-hand corner.
And that's going to add a fourth desktop
which is going to allow me
to pretty much do whatever I want
and I can access all of this
with just three fingers swiping across on the trackpad.
Now, if you are using a desktop Mac, like a Mac mini
you can do the same thing.
You just got to hold down Control
and then use the Arrow keys to swipe left or right.
It works the exact same way.
But again, it's much easier with the track pad,
three fingers up,
you can see all your desktops, you can delete them,
you can add more,
and it's very, very good for multitasking.
Now, the last point I wanted to talk about
isn't exactly software specific
it's actually to do with refurbished Apple products.
So if you didn't know,
Apple will refurbish a lot of its returned
or faulty products
and they'll actually be able to resell them.
And one of the huge advantages
of buying a refurbished product from Apple
is you're going to save quite a lot of money.
So on average it's 10 to 15% cheaper
buying a refurbished Apple product.
And there really aren't any downsides.
So all the refurbished products
come with a one-year warranty
or whatever warranty you have in your particular country.
In Australia, we also have consumer law.
So the Macs will come with that as well.
They're fully tested by Apple technicians.
So even more so than the brand new product,
it's been put through stress testing, physical inspections,
Apple technicians have given it the all clear,
it's also thoroughly cleaned and sterilized
and it's repackaged with brand new packaging.
I personally try to buy refurbished Macs whenever I can
from Apple.
At the company I worked for last
we had to upgrade everyone with new MacBook Airs.
I bought about four or five refurbished MacBook Airs,
they all work perfectly even to this day.
So there really aren't any negatives
to going down that route.
The big upside of course, is you're going to be saving
potentially hundreds of dollars.
Anyway, guys, that's it for this video
hope you found these little tips and tricks helpful.
If you want to know more
or you are interested in similar videos
like this on this channel, let me know down below.
But apart from that, thank you guys
for watching and I will catch you in the next one.