Take a screenshot

Want a snap a picture of whatever’s happening on your Mac desktop? Here’s the fastest, easiest way to do it: press and hold COMMAND + SHIFT + 3.

You can take a screenshot of just a portion of your Mac’s screen; press and hold Shift, Command, and the number 4 key, then click and drag.

To snap an image of just a portion of your desktop, press and hold COMMAND + SHIFT + 4, then drag the crosshairs across the part of the screen you’d like to capture.

As soon as you release the keys, the image file containing your screenshot should appear on the desktop, complete with a date and timestamp.

Related: 5 super-easy ways to take a screenshot on your Mac

Take a quick look at a file

You don’t have to go to the trouble of launching a program to sneak a quick peek at an image, a Word document, or another file on your Mac’s hard drive.

Just select a file or a group of files, then press the space bar to enable the Mac’s “quick look” feature.

Instead, try this: just select the file with your mouse, then press the space bar.

When you do, a read-only preview of the file will appear on your Mac’s desktop, perfect for taking a quick look (and indeed, the official name for this Mac feature is “Quick Look”) at, say, an image file without having to launch the Preview or Photos app.

Move or hide the dock

Want to move your Mac’s dock—you know, the shaded area at the bottom of the screen, where all your favorite apps sit—to the side, or hide it altogether? Easy.

You can move the Mac dock to the left or right side of the screen.

Just click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the screen, select System Preferences, then Dock. To move the dock from the bottom to the side of the screen, just select the “Left” or “Right” options next to the “Position on screen” setting.

You can also set the dock to hide itself until you really need it by enabling the “Automatically hide and show the Dock” setting. Once you do, the dock will slide off the desktop; to get it back, move your mouse near the bottom of the screen (or toward the side, if you’ve moved the dock to the side of your desktop).

Related: 8 ways to make the Mac desktop dock work for you

Make the mouse pointer bigger

Finding an itty-bitty mouse pointer on a big-screen iMac can be like finding a needle in a haystack. Luckily, there’s an easy way to boost the size of the mouse pointer.

You can easily boost the size of the Mac’s mouse pointer from the Accessibility settings panel.

Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the screen, select System Preferences, click Accessibility, then click Display in the left column. See the “Cursor size” setting? Drag the slider until you can see the mouse pointer without having to squint.

Related: 2 easy ways to spot a teeny-tiny mouse pointer

Put a missing hard drive icon back on the desktop

So, one day you boot up your Mac only to notice something’s missing from your desktop: your hard drive icon. Where’d it run off to?

No “Macintosh HD” icon on your Mac desktop? Make sure the “Hard disks” box is checked in the Finder Preferences window.

Beats me why the Mac’s hard drive icon occasional makes a break for it. The good news is that you can get it back on your desktop in a snap.

Click the bare desktop to make the Finder menu option appear, open the Finder menu, select Preferences, then check the “Hard disks” option under the “Show these items on the desktop” setting.

Turn the corners of the screen into “hot” corners

Don’t want to have to remember an obscure keyboard combo or a multi-finger gesture to just, say, turn on your Mac’s screensaver, or make all your open windows fly off the desktop?

You can select one of several options for each hot corner—anything from revealing your desktop to activating Mission Control.

Luckily, there’s an easy way to start your screensaver, switch desktops, view your Mac apps in Launchpad and more with a simple flick of the mouse. All you have to do is enable the Mac’s “hot corners” feature, which triggers specific actions whenever you move the mouse into a corner of the screen.

To get started, open the Apple menu, select System Preferences, click Desktop & Screen Saver, click the Screen Saver tab, then click the Hot Corners button in the bottom-right corner.

Once you do, a pop-up will appear showing all the “hot corner” options for each corner of the screen. Click one of the four pull-down menus and pick an option—anything from Start Screen Saver to Mission Control (to see all your virtual desktops), Desktop, or Put Display to Sleep. To keep a corner from going “hot,” just pick the “-” option.

Choose an easier way to right-click

There’s more than one way to right-click on a Mac’s trackpad. There’s the tried-and-true way—press and hold CONTROL, then click—but you can also tap the trackpad with two fingers, tap the bottom-right corner of the trackpad, or tap the bottom-left corner.

You can visit your Mac’s trackpad settings to unlock a couple of additional right-click options.

To pick your favorite way to right-click, open the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the screen, select System Preferences, click the Trackpad button, then make sure the Point & Click tab is selected. Now, under the “Secondary click” setting, take your pick.

Related: 4 ways to right-click on a Mac trackpad

Get your missing scroll bars back

Wondering what happened to the scroll bars on your Mac windows? They disappeared a few years back, and sadly they appear to be gone for good … well, unless you change this MacOS setting.

Nope, you can’t get the Mac’s jumbo-sized scroll bars back, but at least you can keep the new, skinny-mini scroll bars visible at all times.

Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the screen, select System Preferences, click General, then select Always under the “Show scroll bars” section.

Yes, your restored scroll bars will still look anemic compared to their previous design, but hey—it’s better than nothing.

Quit a frozen program

If you’re staring at a spinning beach ball because one of your Mac apps has locked up, there’s an easy way to get back on track without restarting your entire system.

You can force a frozen Mac program to quit in just a few clicks.

Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the screen, select Force Quit, click on the program that’s misbehaving (it’ll probably be flagged as “Not Responding”), then click the Force Quit button.

The frozen program should promptly quit; after that, you can give it another try or pick a new app to launch.

Related: How to force a frozen Windows or Mac program to quit

Sign a PDF with your fingertip

Need to sign a PDF? No need to print it out, sign it and scan it. Instead, you can use your Mac’s trackpad to trace your signature with your fingertip, perfect for signing a PDF without having to put pen to paper.

Just click on a saved signature to paste it into a PDF.

Launch the Preview app (look in the Applications folder, or search for it with Spotlight), click the Tools menu, select Annotate, Signature, click Manage Signatures, then Create Signature.

A new window will appear with two tabs at the top: Trackpad (for tracing your signature with your Mac’s trackpad) and Camera (for snapping a photo of your signature). Go ahead and select the Trackpad tab (here’s how to use the camera instead), then click the “Click Here to Begin” button. Just trace your signature on the trackpad, press any key when you’re done. If you’re satisfied with the result, click the Done button.

To use your saved signature, open a PDF in Preview, open the Tools menu, select Annotate, Signatures, pick a saved signature from the menu, then drag it wherever you’d like. You can also use the little blue handles to resize the signature if needed.

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Hi Mike! Yep, it’s pretty confusing that there’s an Emoji & Symbols option in the Edit menu that doesn’t seem to do anything in the photo app for Mac. As it turns out, the Emoji & Symbols window is just a standard Finder feature, and it’s not compatible with Photos at all.

Click the Extensions button, then click Markup to begin drawing arrows in your Photos images.

That said, there is a relatively easy way to add arrows, circles, squares, and even text to your images. One way is by using the Preview app, a method I’ve already covered. But you can also add arrows to pictures in the photos app for Mac, too. Here’s the trick.

Open the image, click the Edit Photo button in the top-right corner of the screen (it’s one marked with a trio of sliders), click the Extensions button that appears to the right of the photo, then click Markup.

You should now see seven new Markup buttons in the top-left corner of the screen. The first three buttons let you free sketch, draw shapes and arrows, and add text, respectively, while the following four buttons let you adjust the width of drawn lines, change the color of lines and shapes, and tweak text fonts and sizes.

You’ll find the arrow button under the Shapes menu in the Mac’s Photos app.

If you want to draw some arrows, click the Shapes button, then click the arrow in the drop-down menu. When you do, an arrow will appear right on top of the image; just click and drag to move the arrow, make it longer or shorter, or change the direction in which it’s pointing. You can also drag the handle in the middle of the arrow to bend it one way or another.

Once you’ve put the arrow where you want it to go, you can click the Shape Style, Border Color, and Fill Color buttons to change the width and color of the arrow, or click the Text button to add a caption.

All finished? Click the Done button—and yes, you can always go back to the image to edit the arrow again.

Hope that helps, Mike. Still have questions? Let me know!

Click here for more Mac tips!

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More often than not, though, the dock merely seems to be in the way, obscuring the bottom of web pages, bulging upward whenever my mouse strays too close to the bottom of the screen, and generally distracting me from the task at hand.

Wish you could keep the Dock hidden until you really need it? Just check this box.

But here’s the thing: if you wish, you can actually make the dock disappear from your desktop until the very moment you need it.

Try this…

Click the Apple menu in the top-left corner of your desktop, click System Preferences, then click the Dock icon.
Near the bottom of the window, check the box next to “Automatically hide and show the Dock.” When you do, the dock will disappear from your desktop.

So, now what?

Move your mouse down to the bottom of the screen—and just as you touch the bottom, the Mac dock will slide back into view. Go ahead and click an icon just as you normally would.

When you move your mouse up and away from the bottom of the screen, the dock will slink back into its hiding place.

Bonus tip

Want to move the dock to the left or right side of the screen? Click the Apple menu, select System Preferences, click Dock, then pick an option from the “Position on screen” setting: Left, Bottom, or Right.

Click here for more Mac tips!

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Hi Angela! Great question—and to be perfectly honest, I’ve just been copying and pasting accent marks (or “diacritic” marks, to get technical about it) too. There must be an easier way, and you’ve inspired me to find one.

Say you want to end up with “á.” Press and hold the Option key, press the “e” key, then release. When you do, you’ll see an acute accent (the “´”) with an underscore. Now, press the “a” key, and the acute accent will land on top of the “a”, like so: “á.”

Here are the five Option- keys for accent marks available on the Mac’s standard U.S. English keyboard:

• Option + ` = ` (grave accent)
• Option + e = ´ (acute accent)
• Option + u = ¨ (umlaut)
• Option + i = ^ (circumflex)
• Option + n = ~ (tilde)

Update: …and here’s an even easier way to add accent marks to letters on your Mac.

Bonus tips

• You can also add other regional keyboards with more esoteric accent marks to your Mac’s palate. Click the Apple icon in the top-left corner of the screen, select System Preferences, click Keyboard, select the Input Sources tab, then click the “+” sign to see a list of keyboards that you can install.
• Want an easier way to visualize the keyboard combos for accent marks? Follow the steps directly above to get to the Keyboard preferences, select the Keyboard tab, then check the box next to “Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar. Click the new, boxy Keyboard button in the top-right corner of the screen, select Keyboard Viewer, and boom: an on-screen version of the keyboard will appear. Press and hold the Option key, to highlight the accent modifier keys in yellow.

Note: Want to add accent marks to letters on a Windows PC? It can be done, but not all that easily. Here’s a guide from Penn State with a quartet of options, all of which required some tinkering with your system settings.

Click here for more Mac tips!

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And before heading to bed I opened iPhoto for a specific photo. Nothing. Nada. Zippo. And of course I had emptied my trash. And of course my Lacie external crashed 2 weeks ago.

I am just sick. Please yell at me for all the stupidity, but then…is there hope?

Hi Sarah! Before you totally panic, consider this: you may have just switched iPhoto libraries by mistake. Open iPhoto, click the File menu, select “Switch to Library,” and see if can switch back to your old iPhoto library.

Nothing there? If not…well, I hate to say it, but it doesn’t sound good, especially since it sounds like you don’t have a backup of all those photos.

The good news (if there is any) is that even after emptying your Mac’s trash bin, the files you deleted aren’t necessarily gone forever.

Sure, there are data-recovery programs that can (maybe) retrieve deleted files, but nothing beats a fresh Time Machine backup.

As this Cult of Mac article points out, your Mac doesn’t immediately wipe trashed files off your hard drive; instead, the disk space that was occupied by those files is simply marked as available for new data.

That means if your Mac hasn’t done much file juggling since you trashed all those photos, there’s a possibility that at least some of your snapshots are still sitting on your hard drive, waiting to be recovered.

The only problem, though, is that recovering them isn’t that easy. Cult of Mac ticks off a couple third-party programs that might do the trick, but they both require a certain amount of expertise, patience, and luck—not to mention a fair amount of cash (anywhere between $80 and $100).

There are also plenty of hard-drive recovery companies (such as DriveSavers and SalvageData) that’ll take your Mac and do the dirty work for you, but again, their services don’t come cheap—although if you really, really want your 27,000 photos back, they might be your best option.

Of course, the very best way to keep your photos and everything else on your hard drive safe (although it’s a little too late in your case, Sarah) is to back up your Mac on a regular basis.

The Mac has an excellent built-in backup utility, called Time Machine, that’ll silently back up your hard drive on an hourly basis.

All you need to do is buy and connect an external hard drive (you can get a massive two-terabyte hard drive for about $100 or so), then launch Time Machine and follow the steps. (I have an old Time Machine tutorial right here that’ll give you a general idea of how the process works.)

Apple also sells a somewhat pricey ($300—ouch) Wi-Fi-enabled Time Capsule base station for MacBook users who prefer wireless Time Machine backups. That said, you can always save some cash (like I did) on a portable, sub-$100 hard drive that you connect to your Mac every few days or so.

With Time Machine up and running, you can always go back and recover an old file or folder that you thoughtlessly deleted.

And if the worst happens—for example, if your entire hard drive gives up the ghost—you can use Time Machine to restore all your data, right down to your Mac’s system preferences and even its wallpaper.

Hope that helps (at least a little bit), Sarah. Still have questions? Let me know!

Click here for more Mac tips!

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Not bad, and the price—just $20—is right. So, what are you waiting for?

Well, before you jump to the Mac App Store and begin installing, there are a few things you need to do before making the Mountain Lion leap. Once you’re done, by all means, go buy the update and start downloading.

1. Make sure your Mac will support with Mountain Lion

 
A major operating-system update like Mountain Lion usually demands more power and performance from your computer—and inevitably, there are older systems that no longer have the horsepower to keep up.

The “About This Mac” window will tell you is your Mac is new enough for Mountain Lion. (Looks like my MacBook Air made it just under the wire.)

For this year’s Mountain Lion update, there’s a slew of iMacs, MacBooks, and professional-grade Macs that don’t make the cut. Apple has a list of Macs that do support Mountain Lion right here, but I’ll go ahead and give it to you:

• iMac (mid 2007 or newer)
• MacBook (late 2008 Aluminum, or early 2009 or newer)
• MacBook Pro (mid/late 2007 or newer)
• MacBook Air (late 2008 or newer)
• Mac mini (early 2009 or newer)
• Mac Pro (early 2008 or newer)
• Xserve (early 2009)

So, how do you find out which year your Mac was made? If your system is running on “Lion” (last year’s big Mac update), just open the Mac menu in the top-left corner of the screen, select About This Mac, and click the More Info button. When you do, the next window will tell you the model and date for your particular Mac.

Another way of looking up your Mac’s pedigree is by pulling up its serial number (which, again, you’ll find in the About This Mac window) and plugging the last few digits into a Mac serial-number lookup site, like this one.

If your Mac is new enough for the Mountain Lion update, congrats! If not, don’t worry—you can continue to use your current Mac with its older operating system, but you won’t be getting any new Mac OS X features…ever, unfortunately.

2. Check for updates

Select “Check for Updates” under the Apple menu to find available software updates for your Mac.

Before you start installing Mountain Lion, you’ll want to make sure your current system software is completely up-to-date—and that means checking for software updates.

• Go back to the Apple menu in the top-left corner of the screen, open it, and select Software Update.
• A window with a blue progress bar will open as your Mac checks for available updates to your system. If it finds any, you’ll see a message that reads “New software is available for your computer.”
• Go ahead and click the blue “Install” button, or click “Show Details” for a list of specific updates that your system wants to install.

Now, if you haven’t checked for software updates in awhile, you might have a lengthy list of updates to install; if so, sit back and get ready to wait. I’d also recommend setting your Mac to install new updates automatically; here’s how to do it.

3. Back up your Mac

 
No question about it: there’s nothing fun about backing up your hard drive. But if your Mac chokes during the Mountain Lion update and refuses to boot up again, you’ll be happy you made the effort.

The good news is that the Mac comes with a built-in, easy-to-use utility called Time Machine. All you need is an external hard drive (which you can snag online for about $100 or so) and a little patience.

Once you have Time Machine all set up, it will back up your Mac once an hour whenever the external drive is connected to your system.

If you have problems with the Mountain Lion update process—or, indeed, if anything bad befalls your Mac—you can use your Time Machine backup to restore your system, either to your old Mac or a brand-new one.

Ready to fire up Time Machine? Visit my step-by-step guide to get started.

Looking for more Mac tips? Click here!

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