Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

Color Labels

You can 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 Label, you’ll see seven colored dots, which represent the seven labels you can use. Figure 3-6 shows the routine.

Figure 3-6. Use the File menu, menu, or shortcut menu to apply label tags to highlighted icons. You can even apply a label within an icon’s Get Info dialog box. Instantly, the icon’s name takes on the selected shade. In a list or column view, the entire row takes on that shade, as shown in Figure 3-7. (If you choose the little X, you remove any labels you may have applied.)

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 described on Kind, you can round up all the icons with a particular label. ...