Searching your System Preferences

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can search our System Preferences on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

Let’s open up my System Preferences. I go up to the Apple menu, and then we go over to System Preferences. Now, as you can see, there are a lot of different Preferences here. These are Preferences Panes.

As an example, I have a preference pane for Date and time. I click on this, and we can see I have Date and Time Settings and Time Zone Settings. To go back to all of your System Preferences, you click on these dots here. So we have a lot of different Preferences here.

One way of looking for specific preferences to, what I would call hunt and peck. I can click on one of the preferences panes, open it up, and then look for what I’m looking for, the preference I’m looking for. If I don’t find it, I go back over to all of my System Preferences and then go to the next one. But there’s an easier way.

If you’re looking for a specific preference or a specific setting, what you may want to do is search. Search works well in System Preferences. As an example, we have a Date and Time here. When I click on it, we can see we have a few different options for Date and time. But that’s not what I’m looking for. I want to find where I can add the Date to the menu bar or change the Date in the menu bar. If we look here, you’re going to see it no longer has this in our Date and Time. This is where it used to be in previous versions of macOS. So now, what I would need to do is I would need to click on each one of these until I find it.

Well, another way of doing that is going up to search in the upper right-hand corner and typing in Date. And then I have several different results. I click on these to open up that preferences pane, or what I can do is I can see which preferences pane has data. So we have here Dock and Menu Bar. I have here Date and Time. There’s a date setting for Security and privacy. There’s a date setting for Language and Region. Now what I’m looking for is the one in the menu bar. So in most cases, what I would be looking for is the one in Dock and Menu Bar. So I can click on this to open it up, and then I scroll up until I find Date in the Menu Bar. You’re going to see; we have Clock.

Let’s go back; if I go back over here today, you’re going to see in my results here it says, show the Date in the menu bar. I click on this, and it takes me over to that setting. So as you can see, the search and System Preferences quite good.

It also has other terms. I’m going to go back over to my System Preferences. I want to change the desktop picture, but I came from windows. I don’t realize that it’s called desktop picture. In Windows is called wallpaper. So now I go back up to my search here. I type in here wallpaper and watch what happens. It shows me Desktop Picture as a result, and it highlights the Desktop and Screen Saver preference pane. So I want to change it. I click on the result here, it takes me over to that preference pane, and I’m looking at my desktop. And from here, I can change my desktop picture.

Another good search is iCloud. You’re going to see I do not have any indication where iCloud is in my System Preferences here. If you do not know, iCloud is located under your Apple ID. Well, watch what happens when I type in iCloud here. I click on the result for iCloud. It opens up my Apple ID and brings me to my iCloud Settings.

So as we can see searches pretty good within System Preferences; it’s primarily how I am starting to get around System Preferences myself. I know where a lot of the different Preferences are, but with each macOS update or macOS upgrade, when you’re going from Catalina to Big Sur, as an example, Apple may introduce new preferences panes, and they may remove some of the preference pane, which is what they did with Catalina and macOS Big Sur. Also, within each preference pane, you’re going to find slight changes. You’re going to find that you may have more Settings in one preference pane and less Settings in another. So what I’m finding myself doing is just searching for what I am looking for instead of going to the actual preference pane like what I used to do.

So that’s how you search your System Preferences on the Mac.