Macs are expensive, so it’s important you get the most out of your purchase. And the truth is, MacBooks have many interesting and useful features that the average Mac owner may not be aware of.
Your Macbook can be a great companion for work, education, entertainment and more. Here’s some cool things you can do on a Macbook that you may not be aware of.
Make summaries
Newer versions of MacOS have introduced more features, with one of these being summarise. This feature can be extremely helpful for writers, students, and anyone writing lengthy documents.
What this does is automatically summarise your document, so if you’re writing papers for college or work, the Summarise function can be used to pick out key sections that show others what the document entails.
For studies, this is an extremely useful additional feature that can be enabled or disabled within your preferences.
Use Mission Control to Organise
You can easily see the open apps on your Macbook by using the trackpad to see them. On Macbook, you can use Command and Tab to quickly flick between the apps individually.
However, you can also swipe up on your trackpad with three fingers to bring up mission control. This allows you to switch between your open apps in a smooth and quick function, as well as organise the apps properly as you’ll be able to see everything that’s open.
Add to your reading list in a snap
While some browsers like Chrome have similar features, many still use Safari as it’s well integrated with Apple devices.
One of the things you can do quickly in Safari is add documents to your Reading List so you can browse through them later.
This basically allows you to create temporary bookmarks for pages that you want to go back to and read later. You can do this quickly by clicking in the Share button on the browser you want to save.
Visit the Mac App Store
Believe it or not, many Mac users are not familiar with the Mac App Store, which is entirely independent from your iPhone App Store and the iPadOS too.
The Mac App Store can be used for downloading new applications and installing important updates to your apps.
So, it’s worth scrolling through the Mac App Store to see if there’s any fun new Mac apps in there that you can download to your Mac computer.
Text from Mac
Most Apple users only send and receive texts from their iPhone, however your Mac can send texts, as well as receive messages too.
To install this feature, you must use your Apple email to log into your iMessage account. You’ll then have access to all of your messages – extremely useful if you like to leave your Macbook and phone in separate rooms for work.
Take screenshots of any size
If you’re a Mac user, you’re probably familiar with using the screenshot shortcut of Command, Shift and the Number 3 to take a screenshot of your full screen.
However, you can also use the shortcut Shift, Command and 4 to take a screenshot of a specific section of your screen’s display. This will enable you to get quick snap of a small section of your display instead of the whole thing.
Annotate PDFs without Additional Software
Windows devices require additional apps to edit and annotate on their PDFs, however, Mac users can do this quickly within the Preview function that’s in-built in the MacOS.
With Preview you’re able to annotation and edit PDF content natively, with no additional programs. You simply need to open the Markup toolbar, which will then allow you to draw or use text as an overlay on the PDF – super useful for quick notes.
Make a keyboard shortcut for anything
Keyboard shortcuts can save you time, but you’re not limited to those that your Macbook comes with; you can create any shortcut you want.
You can do this by going to the Apple Menu and then System settings and finally into Keyboard, where you’ll find the option for App shortcuts.
You can then select an app or command you want to run and assign it to key combinations that you’ll type. Creating a keyboard shortcut is a great way to save time if you do repetetive tasks on a regular basis.
Set Up Speech Recognition
Another way that you can increase your productivity is to use speech recognition for everything from opening apps to writing documents.
Using speech recognition or voice control is simple enough, as you can find it within System preferences and then Accessibility. You can now use it to open a Pages document or even close your system down – pretty cool.
Get to know Spotlight
Spotlight is one of the best functions that you can use on your Macbook if you want to make it easier to navigate.
It is built directly into MacOS, and you can bring it up using the Command and Spacebar functions.
Spotlight allows you to quickly locate information on your Macbook, whether this be a hidden app or something within your System Preferences that’s several clicks deep.
Though not revolutionary, it’s definitely worth taking some time to learn how you can use Spotlight, as it allows Mac users a more convenient way to access files and apps.
Conclusion
While macOS still holds a relatively small market share in comparison to Windows laptops, buying a Macbook is a fantastic investment.
There’s a lot of things that are incredibly easy to do on Macbooks as they are built for simplicity, but they also have the power to run many intensive programs simultaneously, which you can see from the cool things you can do above.
