The Finder is where it all happens on a Mac From this jumping off place, you store, organize, and manage all of your, applications, documents, music, photos, movies, downloads and much much more. Let s examine The Finder in depth, starting with the desktop. On the desktop you find The Dock. It can be placed along the bottom of your screen, the left or right side of your screen. The dock is nothing more than short cuts to the applications you use most frequently. You can arrange these short cuts in any order that suits you. If you remove, an application from the dock, it isn t erased - it s still in the application folders inside the finder. There is a saying, a messy desk is the sign of a cluttered mind. Well on a Mac a messy desktop is also using valuable system resources which can greatly slow down your Mac.
As with the dock, The Finder can be arranged and customized to fit your workflow and/or preferences. You can reorder any of the items in the Sidebar. My preference is to have my home folder Gary at the top of the list. I AM THE KING The remaining favorites in an order that suits me. See example below.
We can add additional items to help us navigate, organize, and judge number and size of items. From View on the menu bar, select show Status Bar to reveal number and size of an item, folder, or document. In the example, the folder Kate Curtis Recipes contains 13 items. My hard drive has 219.55GB of open space available.
From View on the menu bar, select show Path Bar to reveal a menu tree of the exact nest location of Kate s, Blue Cheese Chicken Salad recipe. This feature can be particularly useful if you navigated to the recipe using the search option instead of the path illustrated in the example.
With release of OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion when you open a new finder window the automatic default is to open in All My Files view. You can change this behavior from Finder Preferences. On the General Tab, select New Finder windows show: and make your change from one of the drop down options. I prefer Finder Windows to open with my User Account. From this pane you can also select items to appear on the desk top. I like a clean desk top and find no need to see my Hard Disk icon on the desktop. I do like to see external disks, CD s, DVD s, and ipods when they are connected via USB so I keep those boxes check marked.
From the Sidebar pane you select which items you want shown in the sidebar. As mentioned earlier, I don t care for the All My Files view so I don t check that option. * Note: From a Finder window, you can arrange the order of all your items by dragging and dropping them to your preferred order.
From the Advanced pane, I choose to check mark Show all filename extensions because once you know a file extensions it can help you decide the proper storage location. For instance if you found a.jpeg file in your downloads folder, you would know that.jpeg is an image file and would normally be stored in your Pictures folder. If you often work with sensitive information it is probably wise to check mark Empty Trash securely. However, this option takes more time because the trash bin has to be overwritten many times to make data unrecoverable. It s best to leave Search This Mac as the default for searching. The Mac OS is extremely fast at searching your entire hard drive for information.
You can choose to view your Finder items as icons, lists, columns, or cover flow (like itunes albums view). I choose column view because in my mind it most represents what a traditional file cabinet might look like.
We are now ready to become Finder Power Users. We know that pictures belong in our pictures folder and documents belong in our documents folder. We might want to further break down our documents by subject or theme. For instance we might want to have a folder within our documents folder financial matters, and one for family items, or one called medical. It s your call, but getting things into ordered groups is far better than throwing everything into a shoe box and calling it good. To make a new folder, click on the little gear wheel and select New Folder. A new un-named folder will appear in the finder. Rename it and start dragging and dropping items that fit the description of your new folder into it. Your organization scheme can be as simple or in-depth as you desire. It is your digital life. Not mine.
The real mess is usually the downloads folder. Think of your downloads folder as your mailbox on the street in front of your home. You go out and check your mailbox, take its contents into the house, sort through it, separate out the junk mail and put it in the recycling bin. You take your bills to your office, pay them and perhaps file them into a manila folder. What you don t do is go to the mailbox and just look inside and walk away. Get that download folder to empty. Move documents to documents, move pictures to the pictures folder. Install programs (.dng) and then delete the installation file. You don t need it after it has been installed. Make it your priority to make your downloads folder look like this
The following is a list of the most common file extensions. Audio File Extensions.m4a.m4p.mp3.mpa.wav MPEG-4 Audio File DRM protected Apple Audio File MP3 Audio File MPEG-2 Audio File WAVE Audio File.wma Windows Media Audio File Video File Extensions.wmv.swf.mpg.mp4 Windows Media Video File Shockwave Flash Movie MPEG Video File MPEG-4 Video File.mov Apple QuickTime Movie Image (Raster) File Extensions.bmp.gif.jpg.jpeg.png.psd.tif Bitmap Image File Graphical Interchange Format File JPEG Image JPEG Image Portable Network Graphic Adobe Photoshop Document Tagged Image File.tiff Tagged Image File Text File Extensions.doc.docx.msg.odt.pages.rtf.txt Microsoft Word Document Microsoft Word Open XML Outlook Mail Message Open Office Text Document Pages Document Rich Text Format Plain Text File
.wpd Word Perfect Document.wps Microsoft Works Word Processor Spreadsheet File Extensions.xls.xlsx.ods Excel Spreadsheet Microsoft EXEL Open XML Open Office Spreadsheet.numbers Numbers Document Presentation File Extensions.key.pps.ppt.pptx Keynote Presentation PowerPoint Slide Show PowerPoint Presentation PowerPoint Open XML Presentation.odp Open Office Presentation Data File Extensions.csv.dat.keychain.tax2012.vcf Comma Separated Values File Data File Mac OSX Keychain File TurboTax 2012 Tax Return vcard File.xml XML File Misc File Extensions.ics icalendar File Page Layout Extensions.pdf Portable Document Format File.pct Picture File Disk Image File Extensions.dmg.bin Mac OSX Disk Image Binary Disc Image
Executable File Extensions.exe Windows Executable File.app Mac OSX Application Plugin File Extensions.plugin Mac OSX Plug-in.crx Chrome Extension Compressed File Extensions.zip.zipx Zipped File Zipped File.pkg Mac OSX Installer Package Font File Extensions.fnt.fon.otf.ttf Windows Font File Generic Font File Open Type Font True Type Font Looking for a file extension not on this list? Go here: http://file-extensions.findthedata.org