Mac Tips & Tricks to Know
In today’s world, there is a device to accompany every aspect of our day-to-day existence. However, just because we are used to incorporating these devices into our daily routines it doesn’t mean that we know how to use them to their full potential.
Whether it is a phone or a computer what good is owning the latest and greatest if you don’t know how to properly use it to its best ability? In this article we will share some of our favorite Mac tips and tricks to guarantee you are taking advantage of their coolest features.
Mac Tips
- Sign Your Signature: Need to sign a document? No problem: if you have a Mac laptop or a Magic Trackpad you can handwrite on the trackpad to sign PDFs. Simply open the document in Preview, click on the Markup logo next to the Search box and then look for the Signature icon. Select Create Signature and you can now sign with your finger. pdf sign.
- Ask it to read it to you: The accessibility features in macOS include something that’s really useful for everyone: Speak Selection. Once enabled in System Prefs > Accessibility > Spoken Content, you can highlight text and press å+œ to have your Mac read it out. It’s really handy for writers and for giving your eyes a break.
- Use other devices as cameras or scanners: Since the release of Mojave and iOS 12, your Mac has been able to use a brilliant feature called Continuity Camera. This enables you to use the camera in your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad directly from your Mac: you can take a photo and add it to your Keynote presentation, or scan a document and embed it in Pages. The feature is available in Pages, Numbers, Finder, Mail, Messages and many third-party apps too.
You’ll need the appropriate iOS or iPadOS device to be using the same Apple ID as your Mac, and both it and your Mac will need to have Bluetooth and Wi-Fi on. Control-click anywhere in your document (in Finder, Control-click on the desktop or Finder window) and select Import From iPhone or iPad. In some apps the option will say Insert rather than Import, but it’s the same thing.
You should now see a list of the available iOS or iPadOS devices, so for example, when we do it our iPhone and iPad both appear. Now all you need to do is choose what you want to do: take a photo, scan a document or add a sketch.
- Place multiple files in one PDF: You can send a collection of images or PDFs as a single PDF. Open one of the files, press Command+Shift+Option+S for the Save As dialog box, and save it as a PDF. Now go to Edit > Insert > Page From File to bring in the other PDFs or images. You can reorder them in the thumbnails sidebar, and if you want to annotate your pages it’s just a matter of bringing up the Markup toolbar and scribbling or adding text boxes. When you’re finished, save your doc and use the Share icon to send it to your desired recipient. You can also extract individual pages from PDFs. Control-click the page thumbnail and select Export As. You can now export that page as a PDF or image file.
- Copy between devices: Universal Clipboard copies from your iPhone/iPad/iPod touch to your Mac or vice-versa. Provided both devices share the same Apple ID it’s just a matter of copying on one and immediately pasting on the other, such as copying a link or text from Safari on your phone and pasting it into Pages in your Mac.