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

Documents in the Cloud

Truth is, “cloud” is an annoying buzzword. Most of the time, when people say “in the cloud,” they mean “online” or “on the Internet”—terms that have served us perfectly well for years.

In any case, one of Mountain Lion’s headline features is “documents in the cloud”—which means, of course, saving your files online, into an iCloud storage locker. The advantage here is that your file is now available for opening or editing from any computer you use, including iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches.

Your programs have to be Mountain Lionized before they offer this option—and at the outset, only Pages, Keynote, Numbers, Preview, and TextEdit have the documents-in-the-cloud treatment.

Tip

If you’d rather not see the iCloud buttons shown in Figure 4-27, then open System Preferences→iCloud and turn off Documents and Data. That makes the iCloud option disappear from the Save and Open boxes.

Saving, Opening, and Moving Files

Using this feature couldn’t be simpler:

• Save a document to iCloud by choosing File→Save in the usual way. When the Save box appears, choose iCloud from the Where pop-up menu (Figure 4-27, top), if it’s not already selected. Or choose an iCloud folder’s name, if you’ve made one.

• Open a document later from iCloud by choosing File→Open in the usual way. The usual Open dialog box has a new button that wasn’t there before: iCloud. Click it to see the list of documents ...