Quickly Look up Information with the Trackpad

In this video, we’re going to take a look at look up & data detectors how you can quickly look up information just by tapping with three fingers if you have a trackpad. So if you have a trackpad and you want to look up information, you may want to take a look at this video. Let’s go to my Mac. Now, as I mentioned in the introduction, what we can do, if we have a Mac with a trackpad, is use a three-finger tap to look up information. Let’s go and open up my Safari here. I’m looking at this article. This article is on coffee, so I’m reading through it. And I see something that I want to look up. I see probiotic here. I want to look that up. One way of doing that is just double-clicking on it to select it, and then if I hold down the control key and click, I can look up probiotic. I select it, and it looks it up in the dictionary. Pretty simple.

But if you have a trackpad, we can even make this more simple. How do we do that? Well, the first thing we need to do is we need to go to our System Preferences. Now, before I do that, what I’m going to do is I’m just going to hide my Safari here. Just put it in the background. Here to do that, I go up under Safari here, and then I go over to Hide Safari. I can also use command-H. So I select this; it hides Safari. It didn’t quit it; it just hid it. Now what I’m going to do is go back over to my System Preferences. Now I have a trackpad here, so what I need to do is I need to go to my trackpad settings. Under the trackpad settings, when you go to Point & Click, you’re going to see an option for Look up & data detectors. All you have to do is turn this on, and now when you tap with three fingers on something you want to look up, it’ll give you a definition of any word you have selected.

Let’s go back over to my Safari and see what I mean. I’m going to close this. And now, let’s go back over to Safari. It’s going to bring up that page again because all I did was hide it. And now I’m going to go to probiotic here. Now all I need to do is tap with three fingers on my trackpad, and we can see we have my definition. I do not have to select it; I don’t have to control-click on it; all I have to do is just tap with three fingers on what I want to look up.

What else can we do with this? Well, we can get a preview of any links on a page. If I go over to this link here, we can see we have a preview if I three-finger tap. And I can now see what that link is without actually going to it.

This also works with date and time. I’m just going to type in here tomorrow. So now I just have tomorrow in here. If I three-finger tap on this with my trackpad, it will allow me to create an event for tomorrow. So if you see a date in some text that you’re reading, maybe you see a date in your mail; what you’re able to do now is just a three-finger tap on that date, and then you can create a calendar event for it.

So that’s how we use a three-finger tap for data detection as well as looking up information. If you have a trackpad, all you have to do is just go to your System Preferences, and then you go over to your trackpad preference pane. Under Point & Click, you’re going to see Look up & data detectors at the very top. Just turn this on. Now when you see a date or see something you want to look up, all you have to do is tap with three fingers on your trackpad, with your cursor over the top of what you want to look up. From there, you’re going to be able to create an event as an example, you’re going to get a definition, and if it’s a link to a website, you’ll be able to get a preview of that website without actually going to it.

So that’s how we can use three-finger taps for lookup & data detectors in macOS.