Putting it All Together

Speaker: We’re going to wrap it up by looking at a few of these features that I’ve covered throughout the tutorial and see how we can use them to keep our Mac organized. The better we have our Mac organized, the easier it will be to find different files and folders on our Mac, the better experience we’re going to have with our Mac. Let’s take a look at a few tips that I’ve covered throughout the tutorial in this lesson.

Let’s go to my Mac. One of the first things that I recommend people doing is changing where your windows open up to your Finder windows. By default, when you create a new window, I’m going to go up to File on the menu bar, and when I create a new Finder window, by default, it opens up to your recent applications. If you look, mine is opened up to macOS Mojave.

Now, what I can do whenever I save a file is I can select what file or folder I want to save it into. How did I do that? I went up to Finder, and then we opened up our Preferences, and then under General, we have new Finder windows showing. That’s one of the first things I would do is change that from recent items to a specific folder.

When you save a document, you can easily select where that document will be saved to. The next thing I do, let’s go ahead and close this, is I always view my files and folders in Column view or List view. This way, what I can do is I can easily click on the triangle when I’m in List view to see what files are in there or when I’m in Column view, all I have to do is select my file, let’s go over to movies here, and I can see what movies are in here.

Now, I do not have any movies, so let’s go over to Documents, and now I can see all of my documents. I want to go back to List view, I go and click on List view. I think it makes it easy to traverse through my different folders using this. Now, if you want to go to the parent folder, all you have to do is just Command-click on this folder here when it’s in the menu bar, this is another feature that I use quite a bit, Command-click, hold down the “Command” key, and I click, and now I can go to the parent folder.

Another thing that I recommend people doing is adding the Applications folder to the Dock. Now, why is that? It makes it easy to access your applications. How do we do that? We go over to our Applications here, and then you’re going to see the folder here. All I do is drag this folder over to the right side of my Dock. Let’s go ahead and do that, I click and drag, I place it on the right side of my Dock here, and now when I need to access an application, I click on this and I can see all of my different applications.

It makes it really easy to access my applications. Now, one thing that I see people get confused with is the spring-loaded folders. When I go and drag this file on top of a folder, that folder will open up; it’ll spring open. Let’s go ahead and click and drag, and I place it on here. You can see it’s going to spring open. If you do not want to use that, what you want to do is you want to go into System Preferences and search for spring-loaded folders and turn that off.

Again, a lot of people will get confused about that. What I recommend doing if you don’t like it is turn it off. If you want to see how you turn that off specifically or the different settings for it, look at my spring-loaded folder lesson. Now, another feature that I would get used to is Mission Control. If you have a lot of windows open, what you can do is you can see all of your open windows from all of your applications.

The first thing I would do is I would add Mission Control to your Dock if it’s not in your Dock. I’m going to go over to Applications here and now what I’m going to do is I’m going to find Mission Control. We have Mission Control here, and now all I do is drag this down to my Dock. Now, when I want to see all of my open windows, I have the Calendar app open, I have my Contacts app open, I want to see those windows. Maybe I want to go to my Contacts app.

All I have to do is click on Mission Control, and now I can go over to my contacts, and it opens up my contacts or brings it forward. If you have a lot of windows open or a lot of applications, Mission Control can be your friend, and it’s really easy to use, add it to your Dock, click on it and then select the window or the application you want.

Another thing I recommend is don’t use your desktop as permanent storage. When you save files, don’t always save them to your desktop. Your desktop will be very cluttered. It will be hard to find your different files and folders, especially if you have a busy background. I use my desktop as temporary storage. If you were to look at my personal account, I would probably have maybe 5 to 10 folders and files on the desktop, that’s about it.

When I save something, I’ll save it to the desktop, so I have easy access to it, and then when I’m finished working on it, I will go on file then into a specific folder. You do not want to use your desktop as permanent storage. You can temporarily save files there, but then store them in a different folder when you are finished with them.

Then the last thing I would recommend doing is adding your Time Machine here to your menu bar. To do that, you go to your System Preferences, so I’m going to open up my System Preferences here, and then we go over to Time Machine. You’re going to see we have Show Time Machine in the menu bar, and this is selected. Now, why do I recommend this? What you can do when you go up to Time Machine here is you can quickly see when the last backup was.

Let’s go ahead and click on it. I can see that it is now backing up. If it weren’t backing up, I’d be able to know when the last backup was. You want to make sure that your Mac is backing up. Take a look at my lesson on Time Machine to see how we set this up for backing up. Hard drives fail, and when it fails, there’s a good chance that you’re going to lose everything. You want to make sure that you have it backed up to an external hard drive. It’s very easy to do with Time Machine.

When you have it in your menu bar here, you can easily see when the last time was backed up. If you’re not sure if your computer’s backing up, go and click on that to see if it’s backing up. You can also force it to back up now. You’re going to see it says, “Skip this back up here.” That’s because it’s backing up. If it weren’t backing up, this would say, “Backup now,” and I’d be able to back up my computer.

Those are some tips on how to keep your Mac organized. The first thing I would do is set what your new Finder window opens up to, select it to one of your favorite folders. Also, get used to viewing your files and folders as a list or column. Add the Applications folder to your Dock, so you have easy access to your different applications. Get used to using spring-loaded folders, it can be your friend, but you can also turn this off if you don’t want to.

Also, use Mission Control. It comes in very handy when you have many applications open or a lot of windows open; you can easily select which application or window you want to bring forward. Then don’t use your desktop as permanent storage for your files and folders. I recommend using this as a temporary storage place, and then when you’re finished with that file or folder, place it into your home folder.

Then the last thing is to make sure you’re using Time Machine and add it to your menu bar, so then you can easily see when the last backup was, and you can also force your Mac to do a backup.

Those are some tips on how we can better keep our Mac organized. The better we keep our Mac organized, the easier it will be to find our different files and folders, the easier it’s going to be to work with our Mac.

That concludes my tutorial on macOS Mojave. I hope you found it helpful. If you did and you know other people that it may help as well, please, let them know about this tutorial and Noteboom tutorials. Again, that concludes our tutorial and have a great day.