YOU CAN ALWAYS GO BACK

YOU CAN ALWAYS GO BACK

If you have the toolbar hidden, with its all-important Go Back button, you can still go back to the previous window by pressing Command-[ (that’s the Left Bracket key, which appears diagonally to the left of the Return key on your keyboard).

BURNING A CD RIGHT FROM YOUR FINDER WINDOW

If you’ve loaded a blank CD (or DVD) into your Mac, it appears in the Sidebar of any open Finder window. A little Burn button appears to the right of the blank CD’s name (which is “untitled CD” by default). So now, when you’re ready to burn that disc (maybe you’re using this disc to back up some files), you can simply press the tiny Burn button that appears right within the Sidebar. Burning doesn’t get much more convenient than that.

SEPARATING THE RIFF-RAFF IN YOUR TOOLBAR

You can find this in Option-Command-click on the little pill-shaped button in the top right of your title bar to bring up the Customize Toolbar dialog. Then, in the collection of icons that appears in the dialog, just drag the Separator icon and drop it right where you want it in the toolbar.

SIDEBAR’S SPACE-SAVING ICON VIEW

If you think the Sidebar takes up a little too much room, you can use its icon view (which displays just the icons of items in the Sidebar, and not their names, which take up most of the space). To get to this space-saving icons-only view, just click-and-drag the gray divider bar (which separates the Sidebar from the folder’s contents) to the left, covering the names of the Sidebar items, until it “snaps” to the icons, leaving just the icons visible (and their names neatly hidden). If after doing this, you’re not sure which file is which, just place your cursor over one of these Sidebar icons, and its name pops up. If you decide you want the full names visible again, click on the bar again and drag to the right. When you drag past the longest name in the Sidebar list, the divider gently snaps into place.

GETTING RID OF THE PREVIEW COLUMN

If you’ve used Mac OS X’s Column view, you know that when you click on a file, you get a large preview of that file in a new column type called the Preview Column. Click on a graphic – you see its preview. Large! This “feature” annoys the heck out of some people, so to turn off this special column, just view a window in Column view, then press Command –J to bring up the Column and this Options. Turn off the checkbox for Show Preview Column and this wonderful Preview column disappears.