Daily Archives: 07/05/2012

One of the simplest but most useful tricks on all Macs* is right before you… hidden. Just watch what happens when you select the little icon of a file on the Desktop and tap the Spacebar– Poof! You get a large blow-up of the document which is often enough to tell just what the file contains without having to launch its attendant program. You can just take a peek at this enlargement. A great timesaver. When you’re done, just tap the Spacebar again (or click on the ‘X’ in the upper left) and poof, it’s back in place. And, just to round it out, you can also close the preview by pressing the ESC (Escape) key in the upper left of your keyboard (the ESC key is also useful elsewhere. Experiment!)

QuickLook allows you to look at the contents of a file in the Finder at full or near-full size, depending on the size of the document. It can view files including, but not limited to: PDFs, HTML, QuickTime readable media, plain text and RTF text documents, Apple Keynote, Pages and Numbers, ODF documents, Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint files and RAWcamera images. Aaaand… JPEGs, TIFFs, PSDs (Photoshop), AIs (Illustrator), etc etc. If it’s a folder, you just get a large icon of that folder… boo hoo.

Another item of note: at least since Lion, in the upper right of the popup window, there’s a button with the name of the program it will use to open the document. If it’s a folder, it will just open the folder. (oh, just discovered something myself just now– select a number of folders all at once and hit the Spacebar. See the additional options in the upper left! Fun!)

AND, here’s more: if you select the opposite facing arrows in the far upper right, it will show you the preview in full screen mode. (You see that option in a lot of windows, since Lion at least.)

Practice these tricks– right now! Try to use them often, and they’ll ultimately become second nature and you’ll be on your way to MacNirvana!

       * OSX 10.5 Leopard, 10.6 Snow Leopard, 10.7 Lion