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The most common tasks we used

1) You can hide individual windows or entire applications instead of closing them. When you work with multiple applications or documents, windows sometimes overlap and make it difficult to see your desktop or other items.

• To hide all open windows in an application ( including any toolbars or panels), choose the Hide command from the application menu, or ⌘+H.

• To hide everything except the current application, choose Hide Others form the application window, or ⌘+Option+H.

2) You can take a picture of a window using the shortcut ⌘+Shift+3.

• If you don’t need a picture of your entire screen, you can capture just part of the screen using ⌘+Shift+4.

• To take a picture of a window, a menu, the menu bar, or the Dock, press ⌘+Shift+4, then press the Space bar. Move the pointer over the area you want so that it’s highlighted, then click. To drag to select the area instead, press the Space bar again. To cancel, press Escape.

3) Making the screen image appear larger

If you have difficulty seeing or reading objects on your screen, you can make items on your screen appear larger by setting zoom options in the Universal Access pane of System Preferences.

When zoom is turned on, you use keyboard shortcuts to enlarge and reduce the screen image.

• ⌘+Option+equal (=) makes the screen image appear larger (zoom in).

• ⌘+Option+hyphen (-) makes the screen image appear smaller (zoom out).

4) You can view and modify information about files, applications, and volumes in the Info window.

• To see information for one or more items, select the items and press ⌘+I

5) When you finish your work in an application, you may want to quit the application to make more memory available for other applications. This is commonly mistaken with the close window command. When you close a window, the program is still running in the background, taking up computer resources.

• To close a window in the Finder or application, press ⌘+W.

• To Quit an application, press ⌘+Q.

6) You can right-click. Windows users are used to having a right mouse click. Mac does come with this feature, but is hidden, as there is only a single click button on the computer.

To activate the menu list

• for portables, hold down the Control (ctrl) button while you click on the trackpad button

• for desktops or mouse users, go to Mouse option in the Keyboard & Mouse preferences

7) Moving items to trash and emptying the trash

• To move the selected item to the Trash, press ⌘+Delete.

• To empty the Trash, press ⌘+Shift+Delete.

• To empty the Trash without any warning or when it contains locked files, press ⌘+Shift+Option+Delete.

(Co-author with Puat)