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Look Up All Sorts of Information with a Quick Click or Tap on the Mac Apple makes it easy to look up information about any word you can see on your Mac, in nearly any app. To access this information, Control- or right-click the word and choose Look Up “word”, use the trackpad to tap the word with three fingers, or hover the pointer over it and press Command-Control-D. macOS displays a popover with a dictionary definition. And in 10.12 Sierra and later, you can also swipe right with two...

Make More Space for Documents by Putting Your Dock on the Side of Your Mac’s Screen By default, Apple locates the Dock at the bottom of the Mac’s screen. If that location interferes with you seeing as much of your document windows as you’d like, you can set it to appear only when you move the pointer to the bottom edge of the screen. But there’s a better way: put the Dock on the side of the screen where there’s plenty of horizontal room and it won’t get in the...

Teach Siri How to Pronounce Names Properly Siri is supposed to be a competent voice assistant, but sometimes Siri can’t even pronounce your own name correctly! Luckily, it’s easy to fix Siri’s pronunciation for any name. Just say to Siri, “Learn how to pronounce Jill Kresock.” (Siri defaults to “krehsock” rather than the correct “kreesock” in this case.) Siri first asks you to say the person’s first name and then presents a list of options for the best pronunciation. Tap the play button next to each option to hear it,...

The Secret Keyboard Shortcut for Comparing Before/After Edits in Photos on the Mac Photos on the Mac provides so many editing tools that it’s easy to lose track of how an edited image compares to the original. You can always use the Revert to Original command and then undo it, but that’s fussy. Instead, Photos provides a Show Original button in the upper-left corner, between the window controls and the Revert to Original button. Click and hold it to see your original image; let up to see the edited version...

Back Up Before Upgrading to Mojave or iOS 12! Poll a room of Apple experts about the one topic they can’t stop talking about and many will launch into frustrated rants about how too few people back up. Backups are always important, since you can never predict when your Mac or iPhone will be lost or stolen, melt in a fire, or just break. But one time when backups are especially important is before you upgrade to a major new operating system. If you’re thinking “What could go wrong?” the...

Tired of PDFs or Other Documents Opening in the Wrong App? When you double-click a document, macOS uses the document’s file extension to figure out which app should open the file. So, by default, a PDF file called laser-squid.pdf opens in Preview because the Finder knows that everything with a .pdf extension should open in Preview. But what if you would prefer to open .pdf files in Adobe Reader, or you want comma-separated value (.csv) text files to open in Numbers? To change any mapping, select a file of the...