The Finder On The Mac

I’d used but never really explored all the features and things you can do with the Finder app on the Mac.

How to set up the finder on the Mac was something I took for granted.

Well I decided to take a more in depth look and will do a series of videos on the Finder app.

This is the first one and goes through some of the basics on how the user interface is laid out and how you can configure the app in Preferences.

So take in the video and see if it comes in handy.

As usual, if you find the information useful, give it a “Like”, “Google+”, “Tweet”, “Stumble” or “Pin”. Thanks for your support.

For the readers a transcript is below.

Stay with it, stay well and talk soon.

Hey. Claude Pelanne here, Affiliate Starting Line. Welcome. This is going

to be a video about the Finder on a Macintosh; what it is and what it does.

If you have a Mac, you’ll find this application called a Finder, which is

really there to help you manage your folders and your files so that you can

find them more easily. On the desktop, you’ll find that in your dock on the

left-hand side. Then up at the top, you’ll also see in the menu bar up

here, Finder, and you can also access your finder under the file, New

Window. When you open it up your going to come to a finder screen and it

really consists of three areas.

 

The top, what I will call gray nav bar area, where you have your three,

your red, your yellow, your green, closing, minimizing, and expanding

buttons. You have a Back button. You also have View buttons here which give

you 4 different options to look at your files, so is lists, etc., we’ll go

back over that more in greater deal. You have an Action button that gives

you a bunch of functionality that you can use; we’ll go over that later.

Arrange, same thing; once you’re in a folder or file you can rearrange how

it displays, and then you have the Search box here, which allows you to

search for a folder or file more specifically.

 

Then the second area you want to look at is the left-hand side bar. Here

you’re going to find 3 areas: Favorites, Shared and Devices. Favorites is

where you’re going to be placing all the files and folders that you

commonly want access to and you work with. You can do that in a number of

ways: You can drag folders in if you want to do that. What it’s really

creating here is a shortcut to your folder. Then if you want to lose it,

you can Command and put it here, or you can put it in the trash, wherever

you want to go. I hit the Command button to get it off the sidebar.

 

Shared is where you have your shared computers of networks. If you have a

network up and there’s machines that are connected to the machine you have,

it’ll show up here. If there’s no shared computers, you won’t see this.

Devices will show you all the devices you have hooked up to your machine.

Then the third area is your right pane, which is on the right-hand side of

this part of the screen. This pane here displays all of the folders,

depending on how you’ve selected to have them displayed. This is where

you’re going to get all your information that you’re looking for in the

particular folder you’re in. I’m in all my files. If I go to Dropbox,

Google Drive, you’ll see that it displays whatever’s in the folder, file,

or designated picture, music, etc. Here is my user icon. You get the idea.

The Finder allows you then, at a glance, to get a good access to the

information, and then you can drill down to find it.

 

Another area that I would like to cover is Preferences. Once you enter into

your Finder, you might want to come in here and take a look at the

Preferences so you can make sure that you’ve got your Finders configured

the way you want to. Under the General tab, you can see that you can setup

on your desktop to show hard disk, external disk, CDs, DVDs, iPod,

connected servers. You can select what you want to have appear on your

Finder. New Finder windows show all my files, so whenever you get into your

Finder, it will default to All My Files. You can open up your folders in

new window, then Spring-Loaded Folders in Windows delay. I guess that has

to do with the speed with which you can spring-load folders and files.

Spring-loading simply means you drag your file over the Folder icon, it’ll

open up the folder, you can drag and continue dragging down from folder to

folder until you drill down to where you want to put your file.

 

Labels: You can come in here and re-label these colored tabs whatever you

want. Sidebar: This determines what, by default, will show on your sidebar.

By clicking these items, you can see that they appear or disappear. It’s up

to, you can you can customize this anyway you want to have . . . I just

picked everything. I like to see everything in one shot. You can decide

what you want. Then under Advanced, you can decide whether you want to show

all file name extensions, show warning before changing an extension, show

warning before emptying the trash, and empty the trash securely. By

default, it gives you a simple Empty Trash. If you want to empty the trash

securely, you want to check this box. If you don’t have this checked and

you want to empty the trash securely, you can always press the Command key

when you empty the trash; that’s a shortcut to do it that way. I tend to

prefer to empty trash securely. That means when it’s gone, it’s gone.

That’s it.

 

This is a brief outline of how the Finder looks and how you can configure

it. In the future, were going to come back up here to the Finder tabs and

take a look and see what these different functions are. This new Smart

Folder is a great way to create a virtual folder with specific information

in it that makes it very easy to go, mine your data on your computer, and

actually create the customized folder with specific information that you

may need. I’ll demonstrate that in the next video. Then these other tabs

have all variety of functions that you’re familiar with. The Go tab has got

some very interesting things to it as well, and we’ll look at that.

 

That’s it. That’s kind of the window you can see here; the Minimize and

other functions here. Help of course, can come in handy when you’re looking

for information about Finder. There you have it; the finder app on your

Mac.

 

I hope this video has been helpful. This is Claude Pelanne, at Affiliate

Starting Line. Stay with it, stay well, and we’ll talk soon.