Skip to Main Content
Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition
book

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

by David Pogue
September 2012
Beginner content levelBeginner
762 pages
29h 25m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Mountain Lion Edition

The Save and Open Dialog Boxes

When you choose File→Save, you’re asked where you want the new document stored on your hard drive. The resulting dialog box is a miniature Finder. All the skills you’ve picked up working at the desktop come into play here.

To give it a try, launch any program that has a Save or Export command—TextEdit, for example. Type a couple of words, and then choose File→Save. The Save sheet appears (Figure 4-22).

Tip

In most programs, a quick glance at the Close button in the upper-left corner of a document window tells you whether it’s been saved. When a small dot appears in the red button, it means you’ve made changes to the document that you haven’t saved yet. (Time to press ⌘-S!) The dot disappears as soon as you save your work.

In programs that offer the Auto Save and Versions features described later in this chapter, like TextEdit, the red-dot convention has been retired. Instead, when you’ve made changes to a document since saving it, you see the light gray word Edited in the title bar.

Top: The Save dialog box, or sheet, often appears in its compact form.Right (inset): If you open the Where popup menu, you’ll find that OS X lists all the places it thinks you might want to save your new document: on the hard drive, in a folder you’ve put into your Sidebar, or into a folder you’ve recently opened.Bottom: If you want to choose a different folder or create a new folder, click the button indicated by the cursor above to expand the dialog box. Here, you see the equivalent of the Finder—with a choice of icon, list, or column view. Even the Sidebar is here, complete with access to other disks on the network.Tip: In most programs, you can enlarge the Save or Open dialog box by dragging one of its edges. You can also adjust the width of the Sidebar by dragging its right edge.

Figure 4-22. Top: The Save dialog box, or sheet, often appears in its compact form. Right (inset): If you open the Where popup menu, you’ll find that OS X lists all the places it thinks you might want to save your new document: on the hard drive, in a folder you’ve put into your Sidebar, or into a folder you’ve recently opened. Bottom: If you want to choose a different folder ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, El Capitan Edition

Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, El Capitan Edition

David Pogue

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449338978Supplemental ContentErrata Page