macOS Sierra For Dummies - Bob LeVitus

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reveals the Search field at the top of the menu and the Mac Help and New to Mac items. Choosing Mac Help opens the Mac Help window, as shown in Figure 1-5; choosing New to Mac launches Safari and displays a tour of macOS Sierra.

       FIGURE 1-5: Mac Help is nothing if not helpful.

      Though the keyboard shortcut for Help no long appears on the Help menu, the same shortcut as always, Shift+

+?, still opens Help.

      You can browse Help by clicking a topic in the Table of Contents and then clicking a subtopic. If you don’t see the Table of Contents, click the Table of Contents button as shown in Figure 1-5.

To search Mac Help, simply type a word or phrase in either Search field – the one in the Help menu itself or the one near the top of the Help window on the right side – and then press Return. In a few seconds, your Mac provides you one or more articles to read, which (theoretically) are related to your question. Usually. If you type menus and press Return, for example, you get ten results, as shown in Figure 1-6.

       FIGURE 1-6: You have questions? Mac Help has answers.

      As long as your Mac is connected to the Internet, search results include articles from the Apple online support database.

      

Although you don’t have to be connected to the Internet to use Mac Help, you do need an Internet connection to get the most out of it. (Chapter 12 can help you set up an Internet connection, if you don’t have one.) That’s because macOS installs only certain help articles on your hard drive. If you ask a question that those articles don’t answer, Mac Help connects to the Apple website and downloads the answer (assuming that you have an active Internet connection). These answers appear when you click See All Help Results near the bottom of Figure 1-6. Click one of these entries, and Help Viewer retrieves the text over the Internet. Although this can sometimes be inconvenient, it’s also quite smart. This way, Apple can update the Help system at any time without requiring any action from you.

      Furthermore, after you ask a question and Mac Help has grabbed the answer from the Apple website, the answer remains on your hard drive forever. If you ask for it again – even at a later date – your computer won’t have to download it from the Apple website again.

      Click Search the Web (near the bottom of Figure 1-6) to launch Safari and perform a web search for the phrase you typed.

      

Here’s a cool feature I like to call automatic visual help cues. Here’s how they work:

      1. Type a word or phrase in the Help menu’s Search field.

2. Select any item that has a menu icon to its left (such as the three items with Trash in their names in Figure 1-7.

      The automatic visual cue – an arrow – appears, pointing at that command in the appropriate menu.

       FIGURE 1-7: If you choose an item with a menu icon, an arrow points to that item in context.

      Finally, don’t forget that most apps have their own Help systems, so if you want general help with your Mac, you need to first click the Finder icon in the Dock, click the Desktop, or use the app-switching shortcut

+tab to activate the Finder. Only then can you choose Mac Help from the Finder’s Help menu.

      Chapter 2

      Desktop and Windows and Menus (Oh My!)

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      Understanding the Finder

      Checking out the parts of a window

      Dealing with dealie-boppers in windows

      Resizing, moving, and closing windows

      Getting comfortable with menu basics

      This chapter introduces important features of macOS, starting with the first things you see when you log in: the Finder and its Desktop. After a quick look around the Desktop, you get a look into two of its most useful features: windows and menus.

      Windows are (and have always been) an integral part of Mac computing. Windows in the Finder (or, as a PC user would say, “on the Desktop”) show you the contents of the hard drive, optical drive, flash (thumb) drive, network drive, disk image, and folder icons. Windows in applications do many things. The point is that windows are part of what makes your Mac a Mac; knowing how they work – and how to use them – is essential.

      Menus are another quintessential part of the Mac experience. The latter part of this chapter starts you out with a few menu basics. As needed, I direct you to other parts of the book for greater detail. So relax and don’t worry. By the end of this chapter, you’ll be ready to work with windows and menus in any application that uses them (and most applications, games excluded, do).

      Touring the Finder and Its Desktop

      The Finder is the program that creates the Desktop, keeps track of your files and folders, and is always running. Just about everything you do on your Mac begins and ends with the Finder. It’s where you manage files, store documents, launch programs, and much more. If you ever expect to master your Mac, the first step is to master the Finder and Desktop. (The default Sierra Finder and Desktop appear in the preceding chapter, in Figure 1-2).

      The Finder is the center of your Mac OS experience, so before I go any further, here’s a quick description of its most prominent features:

      ❯❯ Desktop: The Desktop is the area behind the windows and the Dock. In macOS 10.12, the default Desktop picture again honors its namesake, showing a portion of the Sierra Nevada mountain range.

      It’s also where your hard drive icon (ordinarily) lives, although if you bought a new Mac with Sierra preinstalled, there won’t be any icons on it at all.

      

If you don’t see your disk icon(s), and you’re old-school like me and prefer to always see disk icons on your Desktop, never fear – you’ll learn how to enable this behavior in Chapter 4.

      The Desktop isn’t a window, yet it acts like one. Like a folder window or disk window, the Desktop can contain icons. But unlike most windows, which require a bit of navigation to get to, the Desktop is always there behind any open windows, making it a great place for icons you use a lot, such as oft-used folders, applications, or documents.

      

Some folks use the terms Desktop and Finder interchangeably to refer to the total Mac environment you see after you log in – the icons, windows, menus, and all that other cool stuff. Just to make things confusing, the background you see on your screen – the picture behind your hard drive icon and your open windows – is also called the Desktop. In this book, I refer to the application you use when the Desktop is showing as the Finder. When I say Desktop, I’m talking about the picture background behind your windows and the Dock, which you can use as a storage place for icons if you like.

      To

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