Get more out of your Mac with productivity tips and tricks
You want to reduce your reliance on email—but the rest of the world still wants to send you 100 messages a day. And you're not sure whether to cut it out entirely, or just a little bit at a time. How can you decide when to use email, and when to use other methods for communication? The experts weigh in:
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Apple’s $10 Keynote for iOS () can import presentations made in Microsoft PowerPoint () or in Keynote for OS X (), but in both cases you’re likely to lose a great deal during the import process. Say goodbye to some fonts, transitions, and builds that aren’t available on the iPad, plus audio and more. (Presenter notes are supported, however, whether created on the iPad or imported from a PowerPoint or Keynote for Mac presentation.) Therefore, when feasible, create your presentation directly on the iPad.
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OS X’s Folder Actions let you attach AppleScripts to specific folders so actions are performed automatically as soon as you add items to the folders. Once you know the basics of how Folder Actions work, you’ll inevitably start wondering what cool things they can do for you. Here are three interesting Folder Actions to try out.
As much as you may dream of a paperless office, you may still receive documents you need to print. If you only have a single printer, and don’t need to tweak settings for different types of documents, you can create a Folder Action that will automatically print any files you add to a folder.
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To use Folder Actions, you must first turn this feature on globally. To do this, right-click or Control-click on any folder and choose Services -> Folder Actions Setup. (If you only have a few Services, you may not have a Services menu and will instead see the Folder Actions Setup menu item at the bottom of the contextual menu.) When you choose Folder Actions Setup, a small window opens showing a list of AppleScripts. Select Enable Folder Actions in the window and then quit (Command-Q).
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The following is an excerpt from David Sparks’s ebook, Paperless (2012, available from iTunes or as a PDF from the author’s website), in which he explains his "paperless" workflow. File-naming is just one part of that workflow, but it enables him to find files and to automate the process of managing them.
I once actually named my scanned water bill Invoice.pdf. What was I thinking, naming a file Invoice.pdf? Looking at my water bills folder, there was no standard naming format; for some files, such as Invoice.pdf, there was no way to tell if it was even related to the water utility. To make matters worse, my telephone, electrical, and waste management folders for the same year also had files in them called Invoice.pdf. So I had multiple documents from about the same time with exactly the same name. Just swell.
The fact that I am a reformed sinner explains why I’m about to get all anal retentive about naming files.
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Google+ may not have taken the social networking world by storm the way Google hoped, but it does offer useful tools for the workplace and project-oriented groups. Hangouts, the company’s online video chat technology, offers a simple way for people to get together and meet, no external software required. The video service also integrates with Google's other free tools, so that you can talk while working together on a Google Doc or share your screen to troubleshoot a problem.
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OS X’s Spotlight feature provides the means for doing this. Just press Command-Spacebar and enter the name of the file you seek in the resulting Spotlight field. But what happens when you can’t recall a file’s name? You could enter a search term that seeks a particular text string within the file—finances 2012, for example. But this method could turn up a large number of results, leaving you to weed through scores of files. Worse yet, you may not recall a line of text that will produce your file via Spotlight.
Thankfully, you can tag files to give your future self a leg up with such searches. Automator makes this very easy. Here’s how:
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