Lutheran High North Technology The Finder

Transcription

1 Lutheran High North Technology The Finder Your Mac s filing system is called the finder. In this document, we will explore different ways of using it that will help you become more organized and efficient. There may be a lot of things in this tutorial that you already know, but I guarantee you ll find at least one thing that you haven t seen before. So as Ike and Tina say, we re gonna start nice and easy... The finder is the blue guy who is always hanging out at the left end of your dock. The easiest way to access it is to click on his icon. This guy is a rock star! After you click on the finder icon, you will see a finder window that looks like this. The finder is how you can access all of the files on your computer.

2 Anatomy of the Finder The Sidebar The left side of your finder window is called the sidebar. Take a look at the descriptions of each item. The favorites area of your sidebar contains shortcuts to commonly used areas of your computer. We will learn later that this is completely customizable. The shared area of your sidebar shows other computers that are connected to the same network that you are. You can click on a computer an access it if you have the correct permissions to do so. The devices area will list any disks that are currently inserted into your computer and allow you to safely eject them. You may also see disk images here, which appear when you install certain software. The Toolbar The top part of the finder window is called the toolbar. Close, Minimize and Resize Name of active folder Arrange menu Back and forward Shortcut menu navigation View buttons (icons, list, columns, cover flow) Search

3 File Hierarchy on the Mac Before we dive into what each folder does, it s helpful to know exactly how files are organized on your Mac. Your finder will give you access to all of the user-accessible folders on your hard drive. This represents your hard drive, the place where all of your data is stored. Users Applications Library System This is where your personal files reside. You can have one or several users on one Mac. The Applications folder is shared by all users on the machine, which is why it s at the top level. Contains files that applications need to run properly. You have several library folders at different levels of the computer. You should never delete files from these folders. Contains the files that make up the Mac Operating System (Lion) Home Folder Your home folder is YOUR user folder Admin User Folder LHN Macs all have an Admin user. This user also has it s own documents, downloads, music, photos, etc folders. Applications 1 Desktop Documents Downloads Music Movies Photos Public Sites Library The folders on the bottom row are the ones that you will use to store and organize files. The other folders are used by the computer for other purposes. When you look at the sidebar of the finder window and see things like Documents, Photos, etc, what you are seeing are SHORTCUTS to these folders. Those are pretty nice shortcuts, because without them, you d do a lot of clicking to get where you want to go. Also, you may notice that you don t see all of these folders in the finder s sidebar. That s because you probably won t need to access them. The folders that you will use the most will be the 3 D s - Desktop, Documents and Downloads. We ll talk about how to access all of them later in this document. 1 This is a shortcut to the main Applications folder

4 Exploring different views You are here. Let s get back to the finder window. We ll start by Exploring Documents. Click on the shortcut to your documents folder in the sidebar. Now all of the documents that are in your document folder are displayed here. Look at the top of the finder window - it also shows you which folder you are in. Don t like looking at your files as icons? The view buttons will let you change the way you see your files. The second button will display your files as a list. The third button will display your files in columns Notice how this changes. It will always tell you where you are. The last button will display your files in cover flow, which is a list with a large preview of the file at the top If you click on a different file in the list, the preview will change to show you what s in that file. It s called cover flow because this view was first introduced in itunes to display album cover art.

5 Quick Look We ve seen different ways of looking at groups of files. Now let s see how to peer into one file at a time. Sometimes files don t have descriptive names or icons and it s hard to tell exactly what it is, no matter how you view it. The next logical step would be to open that file to see what it is, but there s actually a quicker way. Hello, file. What ARE you? Wait! I know you want to, but DON T double click! Click ONCE on the file and then press your space bar...? *If you accidentally rename your file when you do this, just press command-z to until the name comes back. Quick look opens the file and shows you a preview almost instantaneously. No need to wait for a program to open. To close this preview window, just press the space bar again and it will disappear. OK now you can double click if you really want to open it. If not, keep using quick look until you find the file that you DO want to open. That s the beauty of it. All My Files All My Files is a shortcut on the sidebar. It s a bit confusing until you understand exactly what it s doing. It s looking through ALL of your files - the files in documents, downloads, desktop, music... everywhere. It s taking all of those files and showing them to you in one window. Click on the all my files icon and see... wait for it... ALL OF YOUR FILES Right there in one place.

6 You may ask yourself, what good is that? If I wanted to see my files in one place, why would I bother to put them into folders? The most helpful thing to know about All My Files is that you have an ARRANGE button. By default, All My Files is arranged by Kind. This means that it groups all of the images together, all of the documents together, all of the music together, etc. However, you can change that with the Arrange Button. You can look at all of your files together, arranged by their name, kind, application, date last open, date added, date modified, date created, size or label. The arrange button works in other folders, too. Organize your files by date modified and you ll see all of the files you re currently working on at the top. Organize by size if you re wondering what s taking up the most room on your hard drive. AirDrop Airdrop will allow you to send a file from your Mac to another Mac wirelessly (if the 2 macs are connected to the same wifi network). Click on AirDrop Have the person on the other computer click on AirDrop in their finder Your computer name and icon will show at the bottom Other computers who have AirDrop active will show up above you

7 Now just grab the file that you want to share and drag it on top of the computer that you want to share it with. It will ask you if you really want to send it Then it will ask the recipient if they would like to receive it. They can accept or decline. If they accept, the file will go into their downloads folder. Applications You have a shortcut on your sidebar to your applications folder. This is not the only way to access your applications, but it can sometimes be the best way. Double click on an application to open it from here. You can drag applications to your dock if you d like to create a shortcut. Desktop The desktop folder is an easy one. It s just another way to see the files that you have put on your desktop. Among other reasons, it s helpful to use this view if you don t want to close or minimize a bunch of windows just to get to a file that you put there. Remember, you have all of these buttons to change the way you see these files and how they are arranged.

8 Downloads By default, your downloads folder will contain all of the files that you download from the internet (as well as ) You will find that you ll want to clean this folder out regularly. Drag things that you want to keep to your other folders and throw the rest in the trash. Movies, Music and Pictures Your Mac will store files you create in imovie in the Movies folder, files you have in itunes in the Music folder, and files from iphoto and PhotoBooth in your Pictures folder. You can drag other files into these folders as well and they will play nicely together. To access the files you have in imovie, itunes and iphoto, you should go to their respective application and not move them around in the finder. Doing so may cause those applications to lose track of their locations. Media files Organizing Files You will find that you do most of your organization in the Documents folder. This is the best place to keep documents and organize files.

9 The first step to organizing your documents folder is to get all of the good stuff in the documents folder. Look in your downloads folder, your desktop, or any other place where you have random files and drag them to the documents shortcut. Round up those files, cowboy! Great! Now your files are still a mess but in a different spot. You need folders! Did you want to put on your spurs when I called you cowboy? I hope so. Because now, you re going to click on that button that looks like a spur and create a new folder. Now you have a new untitled folder that s highlighted in blue, ready for you to give it a name. Go ahead and type in a name. If you accidentally lose the ability to edit the name, click on it 2 times SLOWLY and it will allow you to rename it. Notice that because we were in the documents folder, that s where it put the folder. You can create folders inside of any folder you wish. To put files in that folder, just drag the file right on top of the folder. Drag files on top of the documents shortcut

10 Dragging and Dropping If you want to move something from one place to another on your Mac, the easiest way to do that is to drag it to the place you want to move it to and then drop it. But what if you can t see the place that you want to drag it to? If you hover over a folder or a shortcut for a couple of seconds and DON T LET GO, that folder will open up right on top of the one you already have open. Keep holding onto the file until you re on top of the place that you want to move it to, then let go. If you drop it in the wrong place, just do a command-z to undo the mistake. It will put it back in it s original place. Another way to move a file from one place to another is to open 2 windows. Go to the file menu and select New Finder Window. In the new window, just navigate to the place that you want to move your file to. In this case, I want to move it to from the documents to the downloads folder, so I ll open both windows and move them around until I can see both pretty well. Then just drag your file where you want it to go and drop it!

11 Navigating to Other Places So far, we ve navigated to all of the places that the finder has given us shortcuts to. Remember earlier when we talked about the Mac s file structure and all those other folders on your hard drive? How do you get to those folders? Look at the menu bar at the top of the screen - Click on the Go menu. You ll see a list of places you can go. Many of these are the same shortcuts that you have on your finder sidebar. Click on the shortcut for Computer. Look familiar? That s the top level of your hard drive. Double click to see what s inside. This is what we saw on page 3 of this document. Double click on the Users folder and we ll be one step closer to your files. As you see here, the computer that I m using has a lot of user files. That means that these people have accounts on my machine. When they log in, they will have their own files in there. If I try to get to their files, the computer will stop me and ask for an administrator password to go any farther. You will probably find that your computer only has your user folder (as designated by a house icon) and an Administrator folder. Double click on your user folder to continue.

12 Now this should look very familiar. These are the folders that you have in your finder sidebar. If you double click on documents, you ll see that it s the same documents folder that you were in earlier. Your Finder was nice enough to give you shortcuts to all of these folders so you don t have to click 8 times before seeing what s in your documents folder. Did you know that you can make your own shortcuts in the sidebar? Let s explore that! Creating Shortcuts to Folders Let s say you have a folder inside of a folder that you access over and over again. If you make a shortcut to it, it s only a click away. To create a shortcut on the sidebar, just drag the folder between 2 shortcuts until you see a line and then let go. Be careful about where you let go. If you let go when the name is circled, it will move the folder into the folder that you drop it on top of. This won t make a shortcut. It will move the folder into Downloads. You can also drag a folder to your dock to make a short there. Again, be sure to drop it BETWEEN the shortcuts that are already on the dock. If you drop it right on top, it will move it.

13 Searching in the Finder There are many ways that you can search for files on your Mac. While you are in the finder, you can use the search that is in your finder window, or the Spotlight search. First, for this example, make sure you re in your documents folder and then start typing in the name of a file that you want to search for. As you type, several things start to happen. It starts to search for files all over your Mac that contain that word and it displays those files. Click on filename contains Now it shows you all of the files that it found on your Mac that contain that word in the filename. You may see files that you did not create. That s OK. That s just because it looked EVERYWHERE. If you click on the documents button, it will only search inside of that folder. That narrows the results quite a bit.

14 Another way to search for files is to use Spotlight. Spotlight really isn t a Spotlight at all. It s a magnifying glass icon at the top right corner of your screen. That s Spotlight! It doesn t look like much, but it is a very powerful way to search. Click on Spotlight and type in whatever you re looking for. Spotlight will search everywhere... your files, inside of applications like ical, your web history, the dictionary, the calculator, etc. Yes, I said the calculator. Need to know the answer to a simple equation? Try typing in or 5/10. It will find the calculator answer for you. To learn about advanced searching with spotlight, check out this tutorial: tutorials/os-x/become-aspotlight-super-user/ Customizing the Finder Now that you are a finder expert, it s time to customize the finder to make it work better for you! Almost every application that you use will have preferences that you can change. The Finder is no exception. Changing preferences is the best way to make an application work the way that YOU want it to work. To access Finder s preferences, click on Finder in the menu bar at the top of the screen and choose Preferences...

15 There are quite a few preferences that you can change and in this lesson I ll walk you through a few common ones. Whenever you click on the finder icon on the dock, remember how it always goes to All My Files? Would you rather it start in the documents folder or somewhere else? If so, you can change it here. Want a quick way to delete or add shortcuts to the sidebar? Click on the Sidebar tab and then check the items that you d like to see in the sidebar. Take a look at the other preferences that you can change. Try them out. If you don t like them, just go to preferences and change them back. Now let s take a look at the view menu. The view menu will change what you re currently looking at. For this example, go ahead and open up a finder window and click on the Documents folder. Then go up to the view menu and choose Show View Options.

16 This window will let you change the way that the active folder looks and behaves. You can decide how large the icons are, how far apart they are, the size and position of the filename, and much more. Experiment with these choices. Try opening another folder, going to view - show view options and change things around. Try it with no windows open and change the files on your desktop. Do you ever have a mess of files on your desktop? Click on the View menu, hover over Clean Up By, and choose how you want to organize your files - by name, kind, date, size, etc. Viola! A tidy desktop!