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Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better.. I Can Do Anything Better Than You...* *With profound apologies to Annie Oakley, this is our theme song for the week. We are going after basic respect. We are going to get it by learning tricks for enhancing skills with the Mac. I want to share some great hints and shortcuts that I have picked up along the way in my computer journey. Some of them will be useful to you and decrease your dependence on others. A good way to save memory space is to eliminate the file sharing capabilities on your machine. You only need file sharing if you are hooked up to a network. If your machine is a stand-alone then try this. Make sure you are not in an active program and then pull down your File Menu and click on find. When it comes up type in File Sharing. If it shows up as being on your machine then go to where it is, it will be somewhere on your hard drive. You will likely find it in the Control Panels folder but mine was in Apple Extras. Put it in the folder called "Control Panels (Disabled)" or throw it away. Don't throw it away if you think you might be on a network someday, just go ahead and move it to the Control PAnels (Disabled) folder. Repeat that process for AppleShare, and Users and Groups. AppleShare is an Extension and Users and Groups is a Control Panel. You don't need any of these active if you are not on a network. One more thing: If you are a more advanced user and understand how to use your Extensions Manager or a third party application like Conflict Catcher is installed on your computer, you can simply turn off those three items there. If you don't know how to use these programs, stick with my simpler instructions. And speaking of getting into your hard drive. You can speed up that process by adding an alias of it in the Apple Menu Items folder (upper left hand corner of your screen). To do it click once on the hard drive icon and once it is highlighted, go to the File Pull Down Menu and hit Make Alias. After it appears, open your regular hard drive (not the alias) and drag the alias to the Apple Menu Items folder in the System Folder. Once you have your hard drive as a part of the Apple Menu you can go there to get into the hard drive. You may ask how this will be any help. The answer is that when you click on the Alias in the Apple Menu Items it will automatically open the list the folders you have inside so that all you have to do is click on the one you want. You don't have to open or close the folder itself. If you want a folders inside a folder such as a games folder that you have created and stored in the applications folder, you highlight the first folder and the others will pop us so you only have to highlight the one you want. You could go from your hard drive, to your Applications folder to your games folder to your Monopoly game without opening a single folder. Here is another hint concerning the Apple Menu. Everything in it is sorted alphabetically. My hard drive is named Broca after the part of the brain that controls communication so it will appear first or second on my Apple Menu. But if it was named Wilbur it would automatically be at or near the bottom. You can make it appear first if you do this little trick. Go back into the real hard drive, not the alias. Open the systems folder and find the alias for your hard drive. Mine says Broca Alias. Click once on the icon. When the name box changes to gray slip a blank space in front of the name. ( Broca Alias). When you open your Apple Menu next you will find your hard drive listed as the first item. Of course this trick works with any item in your Apple Menu that you want to always be on top. If you try to download a picture but can't get it to display it may be because it is too large or because you are trying to open a format that is not recognized by your machine. You will have the best luck if you choose JPEG or PICT formatted items. You can tell what the format is by looking the name of the document (i.e., dogs barking) and see what follows the name (i.e. dogs barking.jpeg). If you have an image you simply must open, try using a program I just love called GraphicConverter. It is a shareware program that you will likely find very useful and you can find it at www.shareware.com. Periodically go through your folders and see how much you have saved in each one. The more items you have saved in a single folder, the slower it will open. Just make additional folders and use some of the numerous folder icons that are available to you free. To find free folder icons go to those trusty sites, www.download.com and www.shareware.com. I found the best choices on www.shareware.com. There were several that were either free or very inexpensive shareware. If you need a refresher course on downloading check out the December 16, 1998 column “Making Stuffit A Little Less Stuffy.” Now the tricky thing is that a folder icon is already a folder! When you find one you want to use, simply drag it to your desktop or into another folder. Even though it doesn't look like a folder, it really is one. When I first tried this I thought I had to create a new folder and then impose the folder icon onto it. Not! This trick works on both Macintosh and Microsoft systems (because Microsoft stole it from Macintosh). If you want to move, throw away, or group in any other way, a number of documents or folders you can do it by putting the mouse in a blank space beside one of the items, holding down the mouse and dragging a box around all the things you want together. Anything inside the boxed area will be included so make sure you have only what you want. Release the mouse button and all the items should be highlighted. When you put the cursor on one of the items, hold down the mouse button and move the item, all the rest will go along for the ride. You can do the same thing with items that are not located next to each other by holding down Shift at the same time as you click on the icon. The icons you have highlighted will move in sync with which ever one you move. This is a good trick to use when creating those new folders that you are going to do to make your folders open up faster. I discovered this trick using the PC at work. Every morning when I turn on my machine I get a set of 6 folders on the desktop for which I have absolutely no use. Keeping in mind the given that Microsoft always knows what is best for me, Windows 95 will not let me throw them away for good or move them into another folder out of sight; and I can not mark the folders I do use with any different colors or icons like on a Mac. So every day I group them and drag them into the trash. When you are using the Find option you don't have to put in the whole name of the document or program you are trying to find. If you can't remember if you named a document “test questions”, “interview tests”, or "testQues", it doesn't matter. When you open up finder you can type in as many or as few letters as you wish from one letter to several. The Find File program defaults to -- "select a document whose name contains ......" As long as your letters are in sequential order and the default isn't changed, Find File will give you everything that contains your combination of letters. I don't like to have a bunch of folders open at the same time. It can be confusing. But say you have gone after that Monopoly game we mentioned earlier and you don't have an alias of your hard drive in the Apple Menu. You would have to open your hard drive, then your Applications folder, then your games folder, and finally your Monopoly game. You can close all the other as you go if you hold down the option key at the same time you open the next folder. I hope you are feeling wiser and more confident at this point. I know there are many other hints that I haven't come across yet and I hope readers will share some that they use. And speaking of sharing - thanks to Jeff Ford who wrote in this week to note that what DOS really stands for is not Disk Operating System as reported in last week's column. Rather it stands for Dinosaur Operating System. Amen. If you have any tips, hints, or thoughts on these topics, make sure you write me so that I can share your thoughts with other readers. |