Finding an App’s Preferences or Settings

Speaker: In this video, we’re going to take a look at how we can view an app’s preferences. I briefly mentioned this in another lesson, but I feel it’s important enough to show in its own lesson. Let’s see why. Let’s go to my Mac.

Accessing an application’s preferences: Now, when we set up an app’s preferences, what we’re doing is we’re setting up the default behaviors for that app. As an example, let’s take a look at the Finder’s preferences. To do that, what we do is we go up under the application name, in this case, the Finder in the menu bar, and then you’re going to see preferences.

Using a keyboard shortcut to access preferences: What I will usually use is the keyboard shortcut command, comma. Now let’s open this up. In most cases, what you’re going to get is a new window that opens up, and it’s going to be that app’s preferences.

In my example here, I’m looking at the Finder preferences. The Finder, what I can do is I can set what items I want to see on the desktop. I can set what I want to see when I open up a new Finder window, remember how it keeps going to recent, well I can go and change that. I can set what I want to see in the sidebar. The app’s preferences, in this case, the Finder preferences, will set how I want to use the Finder. Let’s take a look at Calendar. I go down to Calendar here. Where do you think we’re going to find the preferences? We go up to Calendar in the menu bar, and then we go to preferences. Again, what I like to use is command-comma. Now, what I’m going to do is I’m just going to go back over to my Calendar here, and now I’m going to use the keyboard shortcut command key and the comma key. Now we have our preferences. I have the general preferences, which is where I can say how many days per week, what day do I want to start the week on? When does the day start, and when does my day end. We also have alerts. By default, what do I want the alerts to be for when I create an event; or an all-day event; or even a birthday? Let’s take a look at contacts.

I go down to contacts here and how do I access it, command-comma, and now I have my window here. From here I can set if I want to show the first name before the last name, or if I want to have the last name first. How do I want to have my contacts sorted? Do I want to use a short name format? I can also set if I want to use a template, let’s take a look at Safari. I go down to Safari here, and then we go up to Safari, and we go to preferences. Again, I can also use command-comma. I select it; we have our new window that opens up. I can set what I want Safari to do when I open it up. Right now, it’s just going to open up to a new window. When I open up a new window, what is it going to show? It’s going to show my favorites. What is the homepage> With search, I can set if I want to use Google or another search engine. What we can do when we go to an app’s preferences is to customize it to the way we want to use it. I will generally do when I open up a new app that I’m not familiar with is I will go over to the preferences. Now, I may not make any changes to the preferences, but at least I can see what changes I can make. Once I start using it, maybe I want to make another change to it.

That’s how we access the preferences for an app, and why we would want to access the preferences, for an app on the Mac.