Here at MacInspires we don’t believe in taking shortcuts! We believe in teaching them. One of my favorite shortcuts also happens to be one of the least known that saves me tons of time. It’s called “Quick Look”, and it helps alleviate the headache I get from one of my pet peeves. I go a little bonkers when I am looking for a document on my computer and I think I found it, but when I double click on it my annoyance starts. I now have to wait for Microsoft Word or Excel to open, which can take forever, then wait for it to run an update check, then install the updates since there seems to be a new update every week. Once it finally opens I can see that it is or isn’t the document I wanted and close Word or Excel, which also can be a slow process. All of this is frustrating. The solution is easy though. It is the magic of a process called “Quick Look”. If you have a document on your computer click on it once to highlight it (double clicking will open it and we don’t want to do that, we just want to highlight it). Once you have clicked on it once you can press the space bar on your keyboard and it will open a preview of the document. That is called Quick Look. This will allow you to preview the document without opening the program it was written in. Then one can quickly close it again by pressing the space bar one more time. You can easily move on to another document to see if it is the right one for you. This process is very very handy if you have to send a document or photo to someone and you want to quickly preview it before attaching it to make sure you are sending the right thing. It is something we use often in Apple Mail as well. If you have an attachment in Apple Mail (the stamp in the dock at the bottom of your computer) you can click on it once, then press the space bar to preview it before saving it to your computer. The Quick Look feature does not work on a folder but will open any document, photo, or a variation of these types of files. This is just one of the types of shortcuts we like to use to help simplify our daily computer use. There are a few others that we will be discussing in future blog posts but if you have something that frustrates you or something that you have always wondered if there was a shortcut for let us know and we will gladly talk about it an share it with everyone!
