Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition

Color Labels

This feature lets you tag selected icons with one of seven different labels, each of which has both a text label and a color associated with it. There’s nothing exactly like it in Windows, but it can be very handy.

To do so, highlight the icons. Open the File menu (or the menu, or the shortcut menu that appears when you right-click the icons). There, under the heading Color Label, you’ll see seven colored dots, which represent the seven different labels you can use. Figure 3-5 shows the routine.

What Labels Are Good For

After you’ve applied labels to icons, you can perform some unique file-management tasks—in some cases on all of them simultaneously, even if they’re scattered across multiple hard drives. For example:

• Round up files with Find. Using the Find command, you can round up all icons with a particular label. Thereafter, moving these icons at once is a piece of cake—choose Edit→Select All, and then drag any one of the highlighted icons out of the results window and into the target folder or disk.

  Up to Speed: Compressing, Zipping, and Archiving

  Mac OS X comes with a built-in command that compresses a file or folder down to a single, smaller icon—an archive—suitable for storing or emailing.

  Mac OS X creates .zip files, the same compression format used in Windows. That means you can send .zip files back and forth to PC owners without worrying that they won’t be able to ...