Mac Curious?

For some design and business professionals, this one feature is enough to send them running to the Apple Store to buy a first Mac.

Built into Mac OS X since the very beginning is the ability to save any file that you can print to a PDF. For the uninitiated, PDF stands for Portable Document Format and is the absolute choice to send a document to colleagues, regardless of their operating system. PDF viewers are available for free on Mac, Windows, Linux, Palm, Windows Mobile, the upcoming iPhone and more.

The beauty with PDF is that it retains all of the fonts and formatting from the original computer, meaning that your recipient can have a completely different setup or set of applications, and they will see the file as you intended. Anyone who has ever spent hours prettying up a Word document and learned that their boss received it as a jumbled mess of Courier text will surely understand the joy of PDF.

Here’s how you do it.

1. Finish your document (again, any application on the Mac works with this tip)
2. Save the document
3. Go to the File Menu, and click Print (or use Apple-P)
4. (Optional: choose a printer from the dropdown menu to format exactly for one of your printers)
5. Choose the PDF menu in the lower-left corner of the window
6. Choose “Save as PDF”
7. Select where to save

That’s it!

Bonus for Graphics People: Under “Save as PDF” is an option called “Save PDF as PostScript”.
Extremely handy for those folks dealing with print graphics.

If you find yourself in the Finder with a folder full of photos (try saying that 10 times fast), try using an outstanding built-in tool of Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger - “Slideshow”.

Navigate to the folder, and then choose the photos you would like displayed.

• Press Apple-A to select all,
• or click the first photo of a range and while holding shift click the last photo of a range,
• or hold down the Apple key while selecting photos individually.

Right click (or control click) on any of the newly highlighted photos and select “Slideshow”.

Voila - you have a great slideshow of images without opening any separate applications. The feature even comes complete with eye-pleasing transitions.

This post is the first in a series of Mac Basics.
Seasoned Macintosh users can feel free to skim past these, or pitch in your own thoughts in the comments!

Many of my clients who are accustomed to using Microsoft Windows will often ask me why the Mac does not have a right click option. Thankfully, the Mac has had this ever-useful option for many years.

If you are using one of the newer Mac desktops (iMac, Mac Pro, etc.) - you might already have a multi-button mouse and not realize it. The newest “Mighty Mouse” that ships with Apple desktops is touch sensitive - if you click the left side of the mouse, it detects it, and the same is true of the right side of the mouse. If you have an older Apple mouse, or an Apple laptop, here are your options:

• Hold down the ‘control’ key while you click the mouse button. This gives you full right-click functionality
• Plug in any multi-button USB mouse designed for Mac or Windows into your Mac laptop or desktop, and you’ll be up and running instantly. No drivers or software installs, and right-click is ready to go.
• Recent Apple Notebook (MacBook, MacBook Pro) Users: Put your first two fingers on the trackpad surface, and click. This will also give you a right click.

While we are at it, here’s another tip for recent Apple notebook users: Scroll horizontally or vertically by placing two fingers on the trackpad and moving the fingers horizontally or vertically. The Mac detects that you are using more than one finger and immediately goes into scroll mode. This is perfect for web pages or long documents. Say goodbye to the scroll arrows or mouse wheel!