The 4 Basic Techniques Every Mac User Needs To Master 

One of my most used action when pasting text is SHIFT+OPT+CMD+V. This pasts the text without the format.

Your videos are brilliant, Gary. I've had Mac for nearly 30 years and yet I learn something new in every one of your videos. Love seeing your photos of NZ too!

Great video. One thing I found works very well with dragging from a place that you can see to a place that you cannot see: Start dragging and then press Cmd + Tab (the app switcher) to move to the app you want it to drop in. Similarly, you can hold your cursor above an icon in the dock dock - you wait a little and then the app opens, then you drop in its window.

Even though I’ve been using the Mac for years, I always find little gems of information in your videos. Many thanks, Gary!

I think this is most important and a very useful video tutorial! I have mastered only two of them. But that’s okay. I’m still learning. Thank you, Gary! 👏👍🏻❤️

i've used a mac for years now and i always find something new on your videos - thank you.

There is always something new to learn. You prove it.

Thank you for posting Gary. The video is very helpful 👍

8:45 That was new for me with "move item" and is very helpful. Thank You.

Thanks so much for pointing out the search with the pointer on the menu item. I have severe visual problems sometimes when I can't see what I'm looking for even though its right there.

The “Right Click” or “Context Menu,” via the mouse, is probably the most (underused ) powerful function on the Mac. It’s the one that most Mac users have a hard time remembering yet it is so fundamental to having the best and most productive Mac experience. Thanks Gary for bringing it to all of our attention once again. P.S The article picture, “Stonehenge, Astronomy Picture of the Day”-in the background- is stunningly beautiful.

So well done! Many thanks,Gary!

Thank you...but it seems when I try something...something else screws up...and I can't get back to where I was...the video you did a while back on returning to where you were was a great video...as so is this one...I wish I had you ability to remember where everything is....you amaze me.

Gary is the master communicator for Apple on the Net....always clear, always relevant, always precise and best of all, succinct....what more do you want, I enquire?

Always something more than expected. Thanks Gary

Learned a new Apple term, context menu, thanks Gary!!!

No-nonsense helps! Thanks for all your older iMAC tips, too!

Great tips, as always Gary. Thanks.

Very useful for new in Mac like me. Thanks

Gary, you are an excellent teacher 👨‍🏫!

Great. Thank you very much, Gary, for this very, very useful presentation.

Thank you for Sharing. Happy 2023!!!🥳🥳🥳 Greetings from Cabo Verde Islands. Cheers😃😃

Thank you for making these!

Great tutorials, Gary, they are very educative and useful.

You channel is really informative and helped me a lot with my windows to Mac transition

And don't forget you can also copy and paste between Apple devices. Copy on iPhone or iPad, then paste on Mac and vice versa. I love that Universal Clipboard!

Thanks. Your videos are very useful. One of the frustrations with the menu bar for those who use big screens, with tiles windows…if the active window is the right, the menu is always on the left…a long way to move the mouse. Would be better if Mac sticks the app specific part of the menu to the window.

Great info for me, Thank you!

Great cover. What I like about the Mac is the inverse (redo in this case) is the same combo plus an extra key

Thank you so much for this.

The move copy was a huge help....iv been looking for cut to move photos of USB to drive. Option command V to move copy 👍

Thank you so much for this video. I sold a 2011 iMac to my sister in law. She is unsure, but this video will help her a lot.

Another great video. Thanks Gary.

Whatever I have (and want) to learn your teaching.

you made me feel smart, i was aware of all of this. came to learn left feeling smart, thanks gary

Amazing tips. as always. keep going.

Great presentation. Thank you! This channel provides the most genuine and authentic tips compared to “sponsored” tips in some channels. Wonder why so few people subscribed?

I find your videos are super in teaching Mac techniques. The only problem is trying to remember everything you present. I try and am able to retain some of them. Thank you for these videos.

THANK YOU SO MUCH A BIG HELP

Thanks Gary. COuld you please make a video on who to changed the default sign-in/lockscreen wallpaper? Thanks a lot.

Keep up the great work. Really helps

I have learn a lot from you about iMac computer Thank you

I recently discovered your channel and it’s very good . I plan to buy a MacBook soon. These videos will help me by using the MacBook. You provide some great and useful information . Thank you

For ONCE I am in the know about something Gary is covering.... feels very good.

Thanks Gary.

Thank you. I was going to post a comment as to how drag and drop wasn't working for me in iMovie to bring in media. I wanted to make sure I was describing my issue correctly, so I launched iMovie, tried to drag in an image from a Finder window, and...it worked! Then I tried dragging in an audio file and...it worked! Not sure what I was doing before that it didn't work, but somehow just seeing drag and drop just working led me to do it such that it worked. 🤷🏻‍♂️

Thanks...really helpful

Thank you 👍🏼

informative video, thanks Gary

Thank You 🙏🏻

Makes my head spin!

Thank you!!!

Gary! I want to scream. I have used Mac for many years, and here I learned a handful of things I didn’t know. Big Thanks!!!

Hi Gary, another great video, thank you very much. I have a question, if a file such as an mp4 for example, is copied a few times, does it lose any detail or data? Thanks again.👍🏻

Cool, yup these are the most super important subtools of this amazing Apple Mac and macOS super tool. I'd love to add Redo shortcut: Shift-Command-Z which is useful for comparison and for changing the mind with Undo. God bless Apple, Sir Wozniak for inventing the first practical personal computer for the rest of us.

So I am a little master I think 😅 Thanks, Gary, The Great MacMaster, for next awesome video! 😎

as a longtime Windows user (no programming, just basic things), going to a Mac can be confusing at first. I started looking how to do things the Windows way (by clicking on commands) and was disappointed how you have to go from bottom to top, from left to right to get simple things done. Windows can get more things done by right clicking the mouse (as far as I know). But seeing your videos I found out many things can be done by just dragging files over, without even the need to click commands. It will be a sometimes frustrating learning process for me, but I'm sure your videos will be there to get me through. Thanks.

Thanks mastering these short cuts will improve productivity and accuracy. Best regards, Shirish Balekundri, Affiliate Marketing Expert, Singapore

For the first time of many I actually knew all of this!!!

4:30 ¿Is there a change in the last Catalina for the mouse settings? The right click is just not working. To get the contextual menu I have to hit ^ + right click (like in the macbook mousepads, like you do as the first way). Or is something wrong with my hardware? In Preferences, I have already set up the right click as Secondary Click. I don‘ understand why is this not working as expected.

You are my GURU.

Using Stoplight I brought up a file in Pages. But I can't see a way to view a path in order to find what folder the file is located. Knowing where a file is stored on the hard drive seems essential to me. How can I do this?

Excellent help, Gary! As a 30+ year user of Windows, I recently bought a MacBook Pro. I’m very happy that I have switched but there is a bit of a learning curve. One issue I need help with: how to select say, 300 photos from my SD card, then copy them to a folder on my Mac or in iCloud? This was so simple in Windows and probably is on the Mac as well…

Hi Gary what is the use of alpha in(arrange section) of Mac pages app? Does it used for spacing or arranging the text.

It is nice to see some of the basics reviewed from time to time. I have used Macs since 2009, but often forget things I don’t use often. This is nice as a refresher, but really great for new users. I suspect Windows 11 may move a few more to a Mac once they find their hardware won’t run Windows 11. 😁. I am curious to see what happens with Parallels on my Mac if I try to install Win 11.

Hi Sir, I really like your video recording style and presenting style; it's so minimal. Could you please make a video about "How you make your video/ How you record and edit your video?"

Gary, your video is so useful when it is played at .75x speed! When students are absorbing new terms, and they are auditorily presented at a very rapid rate it can be very difficult for them to process. Just something to think about to increase the number of your subscribers.

I've been using a MAC since the LC in the very early-1990s.

Nice 👌 information ℹ️ vlog ❤

I was in a band called, “Dragon Drop”😊

Hi, I use a MBP and external drives, I always see all documents in the recents tab in finder, does this mean I have doubling up on storage space and an I safe to delete the Recent tab regularly without losing these files, photo’s and video’s etc? Thanks and I find your videos so helpful. Cheers

Opt + cmd + V 👍 moves file. Many Thanks

Also CMD+Shift+a can fix an accident in undoing

Congratulations this video is about to have 100k

Your help videos are awesome. I recently converted from Microsoft to Mac. Doing Ok with it. Not very good with filing and finding files...YET. I use the Trash can :-\ more then I should. Drag the file into the trash and then out of trash into the desired location. Best thing about Mac, I don't pay a monthly fee for a word processor/spreadsheet, integrates nicely with my phone and other Apple products and if I need help...YOU or the Genius bar is available at my local mall.

Hey Gary, it appears not every MacOS app allows you to customize the toolbar with both icons and labels. Is this correct or am I missing something. IE Finder does, but Notes doesn't. Thanks for all the tips. Great content as always! :-)

yoo gary, coud you do a video about how to create a music visualizer for a youtube video? as always great content!

Can I change the width of the scrolling bars in finder window or any other apps? it's very thin and I need to make it wider

hi Gary, please how to make toggle list on pages ( almost alike that of notion)?

Thank you for your work. I'm a 73 years old man and, let me tell you, there was a lot of change and progress since I'd learned typewriting and shorthand writing in 1966.

And this is why when I have enough money my next computer will most likely be a Mac :)

Hi. do you know if Apple took away the ability to scroll up and down with the arrow keys on a page. I just updated to the montererry and it won't scroll any longer

damn you good bro. i know some but some of those kind of wow situation

Question when your drag and drop certain items into an email the item is displayed others you just get the Icon. A picture is a good example . You get the picture displayed which is a pain when you are putting text round it. The solution is - right click and select ‘View as Icon’. Is there a way to make it do this by default?

Thank you very much. Hi Gary, could I ask you to discuss one topic about the storage in iMac. I have a 1 TB iMac with a fusion drive and am the primary user. I am running out of storage space at the moment, though I have already store most of the data like photos, movies and app datas like iMovie, keynote etc to ext drive. When I click on the storage of my Mac, there is 398G in "other users" and 570G in "other". However I can't physically delete these folders because they are dimmed. I greatly appreciate if you could discuss this topic in your tutorial. Thanks in advance.

You videos are excellent BUT- how can you link to either a document or a file from another document. For example, I have a file named "help me.pdf" how can I put the name and address of the file into a document so that when I click it, it either takes me to the folder or, better, opens the document. Is this possible?????

Sending this to my 69 year old mother! I can't understand how she can't learn mac same with my father have literally trying to train my dad to double click and copy paste for over 20 years. Can't make this up

Two things: Save a click and use a universal function by setting the secondary function to single finger right click on the track pad and set the right click on the mouse for the secondary function. All other trackpad gestures stay the same. I haven't used a (STILL dopey) Mac mouse for over a decade. They still have right and left clicks. I checked. Also, a FANTASTIC feature that makes the desktop serve a useful purpose is to set it to use "Stacks". A universal opinion is that having folders and items on the desktop is a useless OOOOOLD holdout from the earliest GUIs. Desktop is a Folder in the finder, just like any other. Setting Stacks view on the desk at least gives you visual USEFUL feature with information about the stack that you can interact with with the mouse if you want, without opening the finder. It's like a real "desk".

My new MacBook Air has a twenty four hour clock in the Menu bar that I would like toi be a twelve opr clock but can't out how to change it. I too am here in the denver Colorado area.

Dragging a photo from the Photos app onto the Desktop's drop zone shows a green plus sign, but when I release, it does not work. From the Finder, it does, but from the Photos app it doesn't 😞

My QuickTime Player isn't working well. Is it possible to uninstall it and reinstall it. Do you know of any fix Gary?

I wash Apple was more dictatorial about requiring fundamentals. For example, I often want to paste text from one place to another without formatting. Not all apps use the same key combinations. My experience is that sometimes a drag and drop moves a file and sometimes it only copies a file. It's too late for this, but it drives me crazy that there is little consistency for how Cmd is used and how Ctrl is used. Remembering the dog's breakfast of seemingly random key combinations is daunting.

I am not able to copyor move files to external drive ATTACHED to my router.

My Help option no longer works. It says unavailable. How do I get it to be available?

How do you default RU-vid to chrome without making chrome your primary browser?

I'm horrible at shortcuts. Cmd + C or V is about my functional capacity.

I need help How to slide download photos?

1:16 - 1:28

there is one thing missing from this tutorial: How to to do CUT + PASTE like in Windows. You can copy with CMD+C and to paste to destination with CMD+OPTION(ALT)+V and this will remove the original copy where you copied the file from. This is the equivalent of Windows CTRL+X + CTRL+V - stupid of apple not to include this shortcut.

Who knew? ❤