Open Recent Documents from a Closed app with the Mac’s Dock

In this video, we’re going to look at how we can open up our recent documents through the Dock on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

Now, if you’ve been on the Mac for a while, you may know that you can open up your recent documents by going up to the Apple menu and then going to Recent Items, and from here, you go to your Recent Documents. This has been around on the Mac for as long as I can remember. We can also open up any recent applications.

Well, in recent macOS versions, they’ve added the ability to open up your different documents from within the Dock itself. What’s nice about doing this through the Dock is we can look at all of our recent documents for a specific app. Our recent items from the menu bar just shows us all of our recent items. It does not categorize them by the app. When we do it through the Dock, we can look for a recent document for a specific app; in other words, I want to see all of my Pages documents, my recent Pages documents and open up one of those. I can easily do that from the Dock. Maybe I had a Keynote presentation that I recently opened. I want to open that back up. I can easily do that from the Dock.

To do that, all we have to do is just go down to the application, so let’s go down to Pages here. If I click and hold, you’re going to see Show Recents. When I select this, I can see all of my recent documents that I had open. And from here, all I have to do is just move my cursor over the top of the document, you’re going to see that it turns blue, I select it, and it opens it back up. Let’s take a look at this with Keynote. I want to open up a recent document from Keynote. I go down to Keynote in my Dock, click and hold, we go over to Show Recents. It hides all of my other windows. And from here, I can select which presentation I want to open up. So let’s open up the Tulip Time presentation, and now it is opening up that document. We’re going to take one more or look at this; we’re going to go to Numbers. I go down to Numbers. You can see that Numbers is not open, it doesn’t have the black dot below it, so this application is not open. To view my recent documents that I did have open, I click and hold, I go to Show Recents. It’s going to hide all of my applications, and then I’m able to select which document I want to open from here.

So that’s how we can open up our recent documents from the Dock. All we have to do is just click and hold on to the application. It doesn’t have to be open. We just click and hold on to it while it’s in the Dock. When we do that, you’re going to see Show Recents. Select Show Recents, your Mac is going to hide all of the windows, all of the open windows, and then at the bottom, you’re going to have a strip of all of your recent documents. Just select which document you want to open, and your Mac will open up that document in that application.

So that’s how we open up our recent documents from the Dock on the Mac.