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

Preview

Preview is OS X’s graphics viewer, fax viewer, scanning program, and PDF reader. It’s always been teeming with features that most Mac owners never even knew were there—but now it’s a flagship OS X program, offering all of Apple’s pet cutting-edge features like Auto Save, Versions, and full-screen mode. In fact, in Mountain Lion, Preview also gains the ability to save files online, in your iCloud locker. And its Share icon () lets you send an document to somebody else by email, AirDrop, or Messages, or send an open graphic via Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr.

Tip

Preview can even open Microsoft Office documents (Word, PowerPoint, Excel) and iWork documents (Pages, Numbers, Keynote). You can’t edit them in Preview, but you can read them, search them, and print them. No longer must you pay homage to Microsoft’s bottom line just to have a look at the documents people send you.

Importing Camera Photos

Preview can import pictures directly from a digital camera (or iPhone), meaning that there are now three OS X apps that can perform that duty. (iPhoto and Image Capture are the other two.) It’s sometimes handy to use Preview for this purpose, though, because it has some great tools for photos: color-correction controls, size/resolution options, format conversion, and so on.

The actual importing process, though, is exactly like using Image Capture. Connect your camera, choose File→Import from ...