Accessing the Mac’s Secondary Menu

Now, in addition to having our menu bar at the top, we can also access a lot of the features of the menu bar through a secondary menu. Let’s take a look at the secondary menu on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

So we know that we have our menu bar at the top of the display. We’ll also, we can get a secondary menu that shows underneath our cursor. So I have my cursor. If I just tap on my track pad, I have a track pad. If I just tap on my track pad with two fingers, by default what we get is a secondary menu. You’re going to see it has a lot of same features as our menu bar. If I go under File here, I can go and create a new folder. If I go to my secondary menu, I can go and create a new folder.

Let’s go and select a file here. I have this image. I’m going to select it, just tap on at once. And now when I go up under File, what I’m able to do is I’m able to open this. I can open it up with a different application. Well same thing with the secondary menu. I’m going to tap with two fingers on my track pad. And now what I can do is I can open it. I can open it up with a different application. I can go and apply a tag to it. So we know that we can access this now by just tapping with two fingers on the track pad and we get our secondary menu.

But wonder if you don’t have a track pad and you have a mouse? Well, what you can do is you can set one of the buttons on your mouse to open up the secondary menu. To do that, you go to your System Preferences. And then you go over to Mouse and you’re going to see all of the preferences for your mouse. In my case, I have multiple buttons here. So now what I do is I set the left button here to be my secondary button. And now when I click that button, what it’s going to do is it’s going to show my secondary menu.

Now let’s say you didn’t have a mouse that has buttons. You just have one button on it. So then what do you do where you can also access the secondary menu by using the control key? So now what I’m going to do is I’m going to hold down the control key. And all I have to do is just click with my track pad or my mouse. I just click one time and I have my secondary menu. So we can access it if you have a track pad by tapping with two fingers, if you have a mouse, you just go and set what button you want to have to access your secondary menu. Or what you can do is you can hold down the control key.

Now let’s say you’re coming from windows. With windows, what you do is you tap in the lower left-hand corner or the lower right-hand corner of your track pad to access the secondary menu. Well, we can mimic that same behavior. All I have to do is just go to my System Preferences, and then we go over to track pad and under point and click, you’re going to see we have Secondary Click and by default it is set for clicking or tapping with two fingers. But when I click on this, I can set it to click in the bottom right corner or the bottom left corner. I’m going to leave it at two fingers and let’s close.

Now, in addition to accessing our secondary menu in the finder, we can also access it through various apps. As an example, let’s go and open up my calendar. When I secondary click on a day here, I’m going to go to the ninth year and I’m going to tap with two fingers. I can go and easily create a new event. If I go to the 25th year and I control click on it, what he thinks. Hold down the control key and click. I can create a new event. Let’s go and open up Safari. I open up Safari and now let’s go and open up Apple. So I’m going to Apple’s website here. And then when I access my secondary click or secondary menu, what I can do is I can go back. I can reload the page or I can go and print the page.

So that’s how we access the secondary menu on the Mac.