Switching From Windows to Mac (4 page)

You can manage the trash yourself, but I also highly recommend an app called “Clean My Mac” (
https://macpaw.com/cleanmymac
); it’s a little expensive, but when I use it, it normally helps me free up 1GB of storage just by deleting installation files and extensions that I don’t need.

The little lights in the image above have no name. Some people call them traffic lights. You’ll start seeing a lot of them because nearly all Mac programs use them. On a Windows, you’ve seen them as an X and a minus in the upper right of your screen. On a Mac they appear in the upper left of the running program. The red light means close, the yellow light means minimize, and the green makes the app full screen.

Full screen means the program takes up the entire screen and even the dock disappears. You can see the dock and other programs quickly by swiping the trackpad to the right with four fingers. To get back to the app, swipe with four fingers to your left.

The first icon on your dock—one of three that cannot be deleted or moved—is the Finder icon.

Finder is the Mac equivalent of Explorer on a Windows computer; as the name implies, it finds things. Finder is pretty resourceful and powerful so this section will be a little longer than others, because there’s a lot you can do with it.

Let’s get started on clicking on the Finder icon.

There are four ways to view folders on your Mac - icons, lists, columns and Cover Flow. Different views make sense for different file types, and you can change the view using the View Options icons (pictured above).

Cover Flow lets you quickly go through thumbnails / previews of photos (it’s a little like Film Strip in Windows); you can also sort any of the columns by clicking on the header—so if you are looking for a larger file, then click the Size column or if you are looking for a recent file, then pick the Date Modified column.

Icon View can help if you need to sort through several image files or applications. It gives you either a thumbnail of each picture or an icon for each file or app.

List View, on the other hand, gives you more information about the file, including the date it was last modified. This is the perfect view for sorting.

Finally, Column View which is kind of a hybrid of List View and Cover Flow View. It shows the folder hierarchy a file is located in. Notice that Finder doesn’t include the Windows “go up one level” button – Column View is a good way to get the same results and navigate easily through your file structure.

Finder gives you a number of ways to sort your files and folders. You can sort by name, type, application required for opening the file (like Microsoft Word, for example), the date the file was created, modified, or opened, the file size, and any tags you may have applied.

Most file management tasks in OS X are similar to Windows. Files can be dragged and dropped, copied, cut and pasted. If you need to create a new folder, use the Gear icon in Finder, which will give you the option you need.

Yosemite also allows you to batch rename files (i.e. rename several files at once instead of one at a time), potentially saving you hours of time, depending on your file system. To take advantage of this, select the files you’d like to rename (hint: use COMMAND + click to select multiple files, or use COMMAND + A to select everything). Then right-click the selected files and choose “Rename X items.”