Useful Tips & Tricks for New Mac Users

MacOS has long been termed as quite user-friendly and seamless. However, if you’ve just switched from a PC, you may not quickly concur. This is because the operating system organizes things differently, so it will take some time to familiarize yourself and learn how to stop recording in QuickTime player.

To help you get started more quickly, we’ll show you some useful tips and tricks for new Mac users. These should help you familiarize yourself with your new OS and do things much faster.

Make the Most Out of Spotlight Search

If you are used to Windows Search, it’s also available here. However, the macOS version is even much more powerful, not just a tool for searching for files and apps. Its purpose is to make your life much easier, and it does this by acting as a quick source of information. If you need to know the weather today, see the population of New York, or even convert $10 to Euros, just type it on Spotlight. The feature will fetch the information right away.

Spotlight also accepts more complex challenges as it can process natural language. For example, you don’t need to find the exact name of a file you saved last week to search for it. Simply tell Spotlight to find “documents from last week” or “photos from June,” and it will happily help you. To open Spotlight, click on the magnifying glass in the menu bar or press Command + Space on your keyboard.

Start Multitasking With Split View

There are times when you’ll need to open two apps simultaneously. Your Mac lets you multitask and streamline tasks by providing a Split View feature. This feature is quite useful as it allows you to run two applications simultaneously and easily move data from one to the other.

To start using Split View, open one of the apps you’d like to use and click on the green button usually found in the top-left corner. Choose whether you want that app on the left or right, then move to the other side to select the other app. You can adjust the sizes of these screens and even switch one of the apps.

Use Mission Control

If you like multitasking, you can often find switching between programs or organizing your work difficult. Enter Mission Control. The feature’s basic use is to let you switch between applications quickly. Once you activate it, you will see all your open apps arranged in a single layer, making it easy to change to the one you need.

But beyond that, it also lets you take advantage of Mac’s multiple desktops. With the functionality, you can create an additional desktop space that groups similar apps or apps you use together. You can create and even manage them without going to other pages.

Press the Mission Control key (F3) or swipe up on the touchpad using three fingers to activate mission control.

Use Time Machine to Back Up Your Device

You’ve probably spent much time transferring your data from your old PC or ensuring you don’t lose it after switching computers. Mac makes it easy to safeguard it by providing an inbuilt backup feature that helps ensure peace of mind. If you lose a file you need, Time Machine allows you to travel back in time and retrieve files as they were on a specific day and time.

It saves local snapshots of your data hourly and on the same disk where the original files are stored. These snapshots are kept for up to 24 hours or until space is needed on the disk. In case you need them, you can simply go back in time.