Macs All-in-One for Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter II.1. Doing More with Dashboard Widgets

In This Chapter

• Viewing Dashboard widgets

• Adding and removing widgets

• Finding and installing more widgets

• Considering other widget programs

Many programs have so many features crammed into them that succeeding versions get more bloated and harder to use. If you only want to perform a simple task, such as adding a few numbers together or printing an envelope, you probably don't need to load a full-blown spreadsheet or word processing program. Instead, you're better off using a much simpler program specifically designed to solve a single task.

That's the idea behind Dashboard. Dashboard provides you with quick access to a collection of small, simple-task programs called widgets. Some typical widgets display a calendar, weather forecasts for your city, a calculator, stock market quotes, and movie times for your neighborhood movie theaters.

Widgets are designed to simplify your life, and Dashboard is the program that helps you display, manage, and hide widgets. By using Dashboard, you can be more productive without having to learn an entirely new program to do so.

Getting to Know Your Dashboard Widgets

To view your widgets, open Dashboard by pressing the Dashboard key on your new or recent Mac or MacBook's keyboard — it's the fifth key from the left in the upper row, sharing space with the F4 function key. You can also press Fn+F12 on your new, recent, and older Macs alike, including models that don't have dedicated special function keys for Dashboard, ...