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1. Diacritical marks. As I discussed in last month’s Tip and Trick, hold down the Option key, type a vowel to get a diacritical mark, let go, then type the letter you want that mark above. For example, “Option – e – let go – a” gives you an “á”.

2. iPhoto’s Rotate. By default, the Rotate button turns your picture 90° counter-clockwise. Hold down the Option key and it will change to clockwise.

3. Degrees and other special characters. Notice that degree symbol in #2 above? I held down the Option key when typing the asterisk. “Option-Shift-8” gave me an “°”. This will work on several keyboard combinations. ¡E??e®îmeñ†! (Experiment!)

4. Switch your speakers or microphone. Hold down your Option key and click on the Speaker icon in the upper right corner of your screen. If you have speakers, a microphone, or headphones plugged in, you’ll be able to choose them off a list. So if you want to switch back to your computer’s internal speakers, you can do so in a flash.

5. Open System Preferences. Hold down your Option key and tap on any of your F keys, the top row on your keyboard. You can immediately open up System Preferences directly to Brightness, Expose, Keyboard, or Sound.

6. Jump down a page. Right now, if you click in your scrollbar above or below the blue bubble, it will either jump you up/down a page, or to that place in the document. Hold down the Option key and it will reverse the setting. Find a long page in Safari or Word and give it a try! Very handy!

7. Open up new Inspectors. This trick works in Keynote or Pages. Open your Inspector, the panel that contains all the commands. Option-click on one of the buttons across its top, and you can have your Text pane open at the same time as your Object pane!

*for keyboard commands
**for right-click shortcut menus

First, holding down the Option key (on the bottom row of your keyboard) gives you common diacritical marks: e=´, i=ˆ, u=¨, n=˜, ~=`. To accent a letter, hold down the Option key, type the character representing that accent mark, then type the letter you want underneath it. For example, Option-i then e makes ê.

If you go to System Preferences > Language & Text > Input Sources and put a checkmark in front of “Keyboard & Character Viewer,” it puts up a little box at the top right of your screen. Click on that new icon in the upper right corner of your screen, and choose “Show Keyboard Viewer,” and a little keyboard will appear.

Hold down the Option key, and you can see all the special characters you get when using that key as a modifier. Try holding down the Shift key, and Shift-Option as well. You’ll see all kinds of characters you can type. The ones highlighted in orange are the ones that follow the tip above.

You have another option as well. In that same System Preferences window, scroll down and put a checkmark in front of US International – PC. Click the keyboard icon in the upper right corner of your screen again, and make sure it’s set to this new keyboard configuration. Now, just like in Windows, you can use these keyboard combos:

For á, é, í, ó, ú: press ‘ and directly after that, the vowel.
For à, è, ì, ò, ù: press ` and directly after that, the vowel. (Note that ` is slightly different slightly different from ‘ … on my keyboard, it is located right of the left-side Shift key.)
For ä, ë, ï, ö, ü: press ” and directly after that, the vowel.
For ã, ñ, õ: press ˜ and directly after that, the letter.

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That means you can save a Pages document in a format your friend on a PC can read. It also means you can send a contract created in Word, and the recipient can’t change it and claim that’s how it was originally.

PDFs are saved like any other file, and can also be organized in iPhoto or Aperture.

To convert a document to PDF format, simply go to the Print dialog box.* In the lower right-hand corner, there will be a PDF button. Click on it, and you’ll have a variety of options, not just for the conversion, but for the action you want to do with it as well.

Choose “Save as PDF…” to convert to PDF and save it on your hard drive for archiving, or future use.

“Open in Preview” will immediately let you see what it looks like.

“Mail PDF” will open up Apple Mail and instantly attach the file, so all you have to do is address it and send it!

“Save as Adobe PDF” gets it ready to be modified in Adobe Acrobat, if you’ll be using it as the basis for an interactive form.

“Save PDF to Aperture” and “Save PDF to iPhoto” will instantly add the file to your photo library. You can then assign it keywords, ratings, and move it into albums. These choices are a great way of creating an archive of important records.

“Save PDF to folder as JPG (or TIFF)” turns the document into a graphic image.

“Save PDF to Web Receipts Folder” from either Mail or Safari allows to create digital receipts to track online purchases.

Once your document is saved as a PDF, its universal file format will allow you to use it in any way you’d like!

*If your print dialog box is very small, click the blue arrow to the right of the printer name to expand it out.

This works particularly well for opening all your bank accounts at once, all your news pages, or your email account and Google at the same time.

To create a Bookmark Group, first open each website in its own tab. To create a new tab, press Command-T, or File>New Tab. Navigate to the page you want. Create another tab, and open up the next page in the series. Do this until you have all the pages open in different tabs.

Be sure to go to the login page where you enter your password, not just the landing page, otherwise you’ll still have to click to it every time!

Once you have the tabs set up, go up to the Bookmarks menu and choose “Add Bookmark for these X tabs.” A window will pop up that says “Saved Tabs”. Change that to something short yet descriptive, like “Banking” or “News” or “My Tabs”. Be sure that the dropdown says “Bookmark Bar” (if it says something else, change it to this). Click Add.

Look on the left of your Bookmarks Bar. You’ll now see the name you typed, with a little square to the right. Click on it anytime, and it will reset the window to your tab set instantly.

Click here to see a video demonstration!

But that’s like owning a file cabinet, and keeping your most essential documents piled in a stack on top of it!

You can accidentally throw them in the trash…save over them…forget to back them up…. You have to look at the clutter all the time. Plus, it actually requires your computer to work a little harder because it has to keep drawing their icons!

The first step in cleaning up the clutter is to put the files away where they belong. Put your files in the Documents folder, and your photos in iPhoto or the Pictures folder. After you’ve straightened up your desktop, here are five ways of accessing your files just as easily:

1. Drag the file to the right side of the Dock. One-click access!
2. Open a Finder window and drag the file to the sidebar.
3. Open a Finder window and drag the file to the title bar at the top.
4. Search for the first few letters of the filename in Spotlight.
5. Use the Recent Items flyout under the Apple Menu.

Click here to see a video demonstrating all 5 methods!

Drag the Document Folder and Applications folder from the Finder to the right side of the dotted line, make sure a space opens up, and drop them there.

Then, click your mouse on one of the folders and hold the button down (or Right-click, or Ctrl-Click). A list of options will appear. Under “View Content As”, select “List”.

If you select “Display As…”, then “Folder”, the icon won’t keep changing every time you open up a document or program.

The folder contents will appear in an alphabetical list. If you have subfolders, point at them and their contents will fly out. Click on the file you want to open it.

Now, you can get to any file or program in just one click!

Click here to watch a video explaining how!

Several calls from AppleWorks 6.0 users after they updated to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard alerted me to a problem: double-clicking on a AppleWorks file brought up a message that the file could not be opened. But if they first opened up AppleWorks, the file would open.

Something else was happening for people who created files that were saved with extensions that identified the file type instead of the application that created it. For example, hand-coded HTML files with the extension .html might open up in Safari instead of BBEdit or DreamWeaver!

The reason for this type of error stems from a technical change in how 10.6 Snow Leopard manages files. Up through OSX 10.5 Leopard, the Finder would look at file metadata called a Creator Code to identify the source application. Now, your computer simply looks at the file extension, the part of the filename after the period (for example, resume.doc is a Word document, and resume.cwk was made in AppleWorks).

To solve any similar errors, here’s what you can do:

View the file in your Finder.
Click on it one time to select it.
Press ?-I or File?Get Info.
Look for a section called Open With. Click on the flippy triangle to its left if you can’t see the details in the section.
Click the blue arrows to drop down the file type.
If your desired application is on the list, choose it. Then, click the “Change All…” button.
If your desired application is NOT on the list, click “Other…”, then navigate to the application you need the file to open in. Put a checkmark in front of “Always Open With.”
From now on, when you double-click on a file with that file type, it should open just fine.

This trick is also good for always opening Word documents with Pages. Or, if you’re upgrading from AppleWorks to iWorks, you can use this to open your AppleWorks word processing files to Pages and your spreadsheets in Numbers!