Mac Quick Start Guide for New Users – Mac Tutorial for Beginners

If you are new to Mac then this is the guide for you. Here is a quick start to get you going with how to use the mouse or trackpad, keyboard, Menu Bar, Dock, windows, apps, the Finder and much more. Get up to speed quick with this comprehensive tutorial.


Video Transcript: Are you new to the Mac and want a no nonsense quick start guide. Well then this is the video for you!
This is Gary from MacMost.com. I publish new video tutorials like this one almost everyday. If you want to keep up with it just subscribe to my free email newsletter and you'll get a list of all the new videos in your inbox every Thursday morning. Now let's start by looking at how you can control your Mac.
Primarily you're going to use either a mouse or a trackpad. If you use a mouse note that the surface of the mouse is actually a little trackpad as well. So you can swipe left or right or up and down to scroll around. You also can click on the left side of the mouse for a left click and the right side of the mouse for a secondary click, also called a right click. On a trackpad you would click with one finger for a left click and two fingers for a secondary or right click. You can customize all of that and see more gestures that you can use with both the mouse and trackpad in System Settings and we'll look at that later.
Now Mac's have a unique keyboard that is different than other PC's. When you want to issue keyboard shortcuts, like say Copy and Paste, you would use the Command Key not the control key, as the primary modifier. So Command C is Copy. Command V is Paste. There are other modifier keys as well, such as the Option Key, the Control Key, and the Shift Key. Sometimes these are used together so you may find a keyboard shortcut is Control Option Command and then a letter. There is another modifier key called the Globe Key. It has a little globe symbol on it on newer Mac keyboards. On older Mac Keyboards it has the letters fn. That means keys at the top of your keyboard can be used either as shortcut keys inside of apps, like say pressing F3 to perform a special function in a specific app. Or they can be used as special feature keys, like Play, Pause, Volume, and Brightness adjust. You can change what these keys are used for in System Settings. But however you have it set you can use that Globe or fn key to switch them. So, for instance, F10 may be set to be used as F10 in an app but if you hold down the Globe key and press F10 it will Mute the volume.
Whether using a mouse of a trackpad you're primary actions are to click once to select something. Like I've just selected this file here. Click twice and it will perform an Action such as Opening the file. Then click and drag while still holding down allows you to drag an item to something else. so, in this case, I can drag this file into a folder. You can, of course, use Drag and Drop to move items around in an app or move an item onto another item. Like I'll move this file onto the Mail App which will trigger the action to create a new message with that file attached.
On your Mac you're going to find a variety of different elements that will makeup your desktop. At the top of the screen you'll most likely see the Menu Bar. To the left side of the menu bar you've got the Apple Menu which allows you to control the entire system. For instance you could Restart or Shutdown using this menu. Then after that you'll see menus that apply to the app that you are currently using. So I'm using the Notes App here and I can see Notes is the first menu here indicating that the menu is for Notes. Each of these menus has commands that are for using the Notes App. If I were to switch to another app this would change the name of that app and all the menus would apply to that. The Menu Bar always appears at the top of the screen, not at the top of the window the you are using. One the right side of the menu bar you're going to see a variety of buttons and other controls. These re customizable and will allow you to control things either system-wide or for a specific app you have installed. Control Center is probably the most used one here and allows you to access various functions like WiFi, Blue Tooth, Display Brightness, Volume, and so on. Also all the way to the right you're going to see the Time and Date and if you click that it will bring up Notification Center. If you have any pending notifications they would be at the top here, Underneath that you're going to see a variety of widgets that you can customize. More on widgets in a bit.
Now behind any app windows that you have opened you're going to see the Desktop background. I'll Hide Notes here and you can see the full background here. Many of use will see a variety of icons to the right. You can go to Finder, Settings and customize what is shown there. For instance you can have your hard drive or external drives also shown here if you like. You can also use this as a location to store files. Although productivity experts would urge you to store your documents neatly in your Documents folder not on your Desktop. We will look at that in a minute as well.
You can add widgets to the Desktop if you like. Just use your secondary click, two-fingers on the trackpad in this case, and select Edit Widgets and you are going to see a variety of different widgets that you can move to the Desktop. For instance I could put a Weather widget here that would appear there on the background and even if I were to use other apps you could see how it appears behind there on the Desktop. These are the same widgets that would be here on the right in Notification Center. So widgets can be either in Notification Center where you can easily Show and Hide them by clicking on the Time or they could be on your Desktop where they are always visible but behind any other windows.
At the bottom of your Desktop you'll find the Dock. If you don't see it move your Pointer all the way to the bottom and it should spring up. You can set it to work either way in System Settings. Now here you're going to find a variety of apps listed by default. You can launch these apps by simply clicking on them. So to launch the Reminders App I can just click on Reminders and it will appear. On the right side of the Dock you can also put files and folders and by default you're going to see your Downloads Folder there and you're going to see the Trash which I'll show you is how you Delete files on a Mac. You're also going to find the item on the Dock called Launchpad. You click that it will show you all of your apps, not just the limited list in the Dock. You can swipe using two-fingers on the top of the mouse or trackpad or using Command and Right Arrow and Left Arrow to see all of your different apps. You can click here to launch an app or Search to narrow things down. So if I want to find the Calculator App I can search for it with just four letters until it is narrowed down and then Return will launch that app.
You can move windows around by clicking and dragging near the very top of the window. So click and just drag to position it where you want. You can also resize windows by dragging any edge or any corner. You can resize the position as you like. Notice that as you drag things around they will kind of snap to the edges of the screen and if you have multiple windows, like I'll open this Notes window here, the edges of the windows kind of snap to each other as well to make it easier to arrange them nicely.
You also have got these three Dots here. Using the red dot will close a window. Now in Mac Apps when you close a window it doesn't quit the app. This allows you to Close this window and then open up a new window without having to relaunch the app. Very useful when creating documents, say, in word processors and such. If you want to Quit the app simply go to the menu for that app and the last item is always Quit or just use Command Q. The yellow button does something called Minimize. This takes this window and tucks it away into the Dock. You'll see it here listed on the right. You can click it to bring it back. This is handy if you've got multiple windows open for the same app but you just want to get one of them out of the way. The green button does something called Full Screen Mode. If you click that then the Desktop goes away and you are now in a special mode for this window where it takes over the entire screen. There are no other windows present here. You can exit it by moving your pointer to the top of the screen until you see the Menu Bar and Dots again and click the green button again. If you instead want this window just to be its maximum size you can drag it to the top left, use the bottom right corner to drag that all the way out. You can also hold the Option Key down and double click any of the four corners and it will do the same thing.
Another command you should know about is Hiding. Instead of quitting an app you can simply go to its menu and choose Hide or Command H. This hides the app and all its windows but the app is still running. So if you're in the middle of writing a document you don't have to Close it and then Open it up again. You can see which apps are running by looking in the Dock and seeing what it there and seeing the dots underneath indicating the app is currently active. I don't see any apps here on the Desktop but all of these apps with dots are currently running. So I can simply click one in the Dock to bring it forward. I can also use the App Switcher which is to hold the Command key down and then press Tab over and over while the Command key is held down to move between all the open apps. When you find one that you want to bring to the front simply release the Command Key and that one will be made visible and brought to the front.
If you've got an app, let's say Safari has multiple windows here like this, I can do Control and then Down Arrow and it will show me all the windows. I can choose which one to bring to the front. You can also use Command and then the Backtick Key, which on US keyboards is right above Tab to cycle between all of the open windows for an app.
In most apps, even in the Finder here, you can go to its main menu and choose Settings to customize how that app works. For System Settings you would go to the Apple Menu and choose System Settings. This brings up System Settings here which has a list of different categories on the left and then whichever category is selected will show Settings on the right. Sometimes there are a lot of settings and you would have to scroll through them to see them all. Sometimes you even need to dive down into subcategories to see the switches and controls. There are a ton of System Settings. So don't worry too much if you don't know where something is. Instead use Search at the top here. Just type a search term and then it is going to show you some suggestions.
To control a lot of how your Mac looks and works you're going to want to look at the Desktop & Dock category here. This shows you a lot of different options for how the Desktop, the Menu Bar, and different parts of your Mac work. Other common places to go to are Displays to change your display resolution, brightness, and other things. Also here is where you will find controls for the mouse and trackpad. So you can look here and see what options you've got. You can change a lot of things. For instance if you rather not click the right side of the mouse for the secondary click you can change it to left side or just Off. There are even more gestures for the mouse here. Not only can you switch them On and Off and customize them but you get little animations that show you how to use them. The same for trackpad. You've got a lot of point and click gestures that you could enable or change. You've got Scroll and Zoom gestures and even more.
So an app that you're going to use so often that you're going to forget it is an app is the Finder. This is what allows you to organize and manage your files and folders. A Finder window looks like this. It has a left sidebar that starts with Favorite locations so you can easily access them. It's got Tool Bar buttons at the top and then the main area here where you can see a location. You can see here I'm looking at my Documents folder. I can look at all these folders and files in different ways depending upon the view. If you look at this button here or go to the View Menu you'll see there are four views. There's Icon View which looks like this. It allows you to move the files and folders anyway you want in a two-dimensional space. You can do List View which shows columns and you can sort your files and folders by these different columns and customize which columns are there. Use the Control Key and click here and it will bring up a list of columns and you can add or remove them. You can also go to Column View and it will show your current location in a column here on the left and then you can select a folder, like that, and it will show you a column with its contents and you continue to dive down deeper and deeper. You can also use Gallery View which works best on folders full of images. You go to Gallery View you get a nice big preview here and you can flip through a horizontal list of all the files.
But in any view, including List View, you can get a Preview to the right by going to View and then Show Preview. Then you can see this preview here as well as other information about whatever it is that you've selected. In addition to going down into deeper folders by double clicking the folder you can Command Click here and go up a level, like that, or you can use Command Up Arrow to go up a level. You can see each folder kind of remembers its view settings. So this folder was set to be reviewed as Column View. To move columns around you would Drag and Drop. List View makes this easy. I can open up this Folder here by clicking on the Disclosure triangle to the left and then this folder here. If I wanted to drag a file from one to the other I can do so very easily like that.
You could also use multiple Finder windows to move files around. I've got two windows open now and I can drag and drop from one to the other to move files back and forth. You could also select a file, like this one, and use Command C to Copy. Then go back up a level, go into another folder, and then use Command V to Paste that in which would make a copy or hold the Option Key down and that changes to Move Item. So Option Command V will move that item that I had copied here. In the Finder, just like in other apps you can always use Undo to undo your last actions. If you ever want to rename a file or folder just select it and then press the Return key and now you can see I'm editing the file name. If you want to create new folders you can go to file and then new folder and it will create a new one and you'll instantly be in the process of naming it. If you ever want to Delete a file drag it to the Trash at the bottom right. Then take a look in the Trash and you'll see the files that you put there. The Trash is a safety net. That means that it takes two steps to delete a file. Move to the trash and then once you're in the trash click the Empty button here or go to Finder and then Empty Trash. This is a good way to make sure you don't accidentally delete a file.
I showed you how to open a file by double clicking it and it will open up in the default app. But if you use the Context Menu, which you get by right clicking or two-finger clicking on the trackpad, you'll get a Context Menu here with various options. One of them being Open With. You can choose a different app to open that file. If you ever just want to Preview a file before opening it just select it and press the Spacebar. This brings up QuickLook which is a special window here that allows you to see the file. You could press the Spacebar again to Dismiss it.
A quick note on file organization. Use the GO menu here to go to a lot of the most common places. At the top level is the Computer Level and if you dig down into your internal hard drive you're going to see a bunch of folders here which you really don't use directly. But your Users Folder is where your Home folder would be, in this case it is here, and in your Home Folder are a variety of folders, like Movies, Music, and Pictures, that contain various things that makes sense for those folders. For instance, a video project you're working on would be in the Movies folder. Your Photos Library will be in the Pictures Folder. You Music App Library will be in the Music Folder. You may also see your Desktop and Documents folder here. But if you're using iCloud, which most people are nowadays, you can go to the iCloud Drive level and here you'll see a variety of other folders, some created by apps. But you'll see your Desktop and Documents folders here. You go down into your Documents folder and this is the best place to store just about any file that you create.
Now what about searching for files. So if you want to find a file in the Finder window you can click on the magnifying glass here at the top right or just use Command F. Then you can just search for the file. Type in either something that you think is in the name of the file or in the contents of the file. So if I type something like this you'll find I've got two options under here. Name Contains or Content Contains. So if I want I can only see the files that contain that name. Notice here I can change it to Everything to see content as well. So I'm going to see the files that don't have that in the name but the content of the file somewhere has that in the text. You can also highly customize the search. Notice here where it says Kind Is Any you can change that to something else. So, for instance, I can change it to the Last Modified Date is within the last thirty days or say thirty months. You can use the Plus Button to add even more modifications to narrow down your search even more.
Another way to search for files is to use Spotlight. You can do this even if you don't have a Finder window open. Use Command Space to bring up Spotlight. You can also use this magnifying glass icon here at the top right. Then you can type what you're searching for. Now Spotlight is going to do a lot more than just search your files. You're going to get results that are on the web. You're going to get results that are inside of other apps like in Notes, for instance here. You're going to get different categories like here are Presentations that have that in the name. Here is a Wikipedia entry. Here are some folders that have that in the folder contents. All sorts of things. Even images that you have on your Mac that contain that subject. You'll find dictionary definitions. You'll find all sorts of things.
Another thing a lot of people like to use the Spotlight Menu for is to launch apps. So, instead of typing the name of a file you're looking for, type the name of an app. Like I'll type cal and I'll come up with calculator and calendar. I can use the down arrow key to go to Calendar and then Return and it will launch that app.
Now let's look at how to customize your Mac a bit. I told you before about the Dock and it has got a bunch of default apps in here. You can take any app you want out of the Dock by simply Control clicking it, right clicking or two-finger click on the trackpad and choose under Options, Remove From Dock. You can also simply drag it up and if you take it far enough away you'll see Remove and you can release and now it is gone from the Dock. To Add something to the Dock, like another app, you can go to your Applications folder. I'm going to go in the Finder here, in the Go Menu, to Applications. Here I'm going to see all my installed applications. So let's say I wanted to add something here. I can drag it from the Applications folder into the Dock, place it where I want. You can rearrange items by dragging and dropping them as well. So you can highly customize which apps are there.
Control Center at the top right is another thing that you can customize. You can bring one of these items up into the Menu Bar so you don't need to use Control Center to access it by simply dragging and dropping it. For instance, I will bring Screen Mirroring up to the top here and add it so I can access it in the Menu Bar. You could also remove items from here by holding the Command Key down and dragging them down. You can hold down the Command Key to rearrange them left and right as well. You can also customize Control Center by going into System Settings and then looking for Control Center. You are going to get a whole list of items here. You can decide for many of them whether they are also in the Menu Bar as well as Control Center. You can sometimes decide whether they are in the Menu Bar or Control Center or both. You can also use System Settings to customize your Desktop Wallpaper. Look for the Wallpaper section here and you can customize it with a variety of different wallpapers that Apple includes. You've also got these special wallpapers that are high resolution arial views that you can download as you select them and they would be shown and then used as a Screen Saver as well as your wallpaper. You've also got a variety of pictures here at the bottom that Apple gives you. You could choose solid colors or you can choose a photo from your Photos Library or from your Picture's Folder. You can even just drag and drop an image into this box here to use that as a wallpaper.
Perhaps the ultimate customization of your Mac is to add more Apps. So you can do that by going to the App Store. The App Store is Apple's own marketplace for Apps. Most of the apps here are from third party developers but Apple puts its own apps here as well. You can browse through the different categories and you can search for different apps that you can then download safely from The App Store and add to your Mac. You can also get third party apps from the web but always be sure that you trust both the app and the site you're downloading it from if you're getting an app outside of the Mac App Store. Many of the apps in the Mac App Store are free but some will cost or some will have in-app purchases to support the developer.
Multitasking is important when using any computer. You can multitask on your Mac simply by having a variety of different windows and selecting which window that you want to be on the front. You can, of course, use the Dock to bring any app and its windows to the front. You can just do it this way. Or you can use a variety of other methods to multitask. For instance, Mission Control allows you to quickly see all of the app windows you have open. Choose Control Up Arrow to bring up Mission Control and I can select which window I want. But I could also have multiple spaces. Here at the top I've got one space and it is a Desktop space with multiple windows. I can click the Plus Button here, add a second space and I could drag some of these windows to it. So now I've got two Desktop Spaces. I can click the one I want to go to and I'll only see those three windows here. I use Control Right Arrow to go to the other Desktop Space and Control Left Arrow to go back or just Control Up and I can pick from the Desktops at the top. Also, if you ever take a window full screen, like I'll use this Pages window here as a full screen window, it is just a space by itself. If I bring up Mission Control I'll see I've got Desktop1 and Desktop2 like before but now Pages has its own full screen space with this particular window. I could still use the Control Left and Control Right Arrows to go between all 3 of them and I could still use Mission Control here to control them.
You can also have Split View, which is like full screen mode, but with two windows instead of one. So I'll move the pointer over the green button here and I'll say Tile this to the left side of the screen. It will show me the remaining windows and I could pick one of these and that will now appear on the right side of the screen. If I look at Mission Control now I see I've got my Desktop Space and I've got a Split View Space with Pages and Reminders.
Another way to do Multitasking is to use Stage Manager. If you click on Control Center here and then click Stage Manager you go into Stage Manager Mode. Then you get windows to the right and a list of them to the left. These are actually called App Sets because windows from the same app will be grouped together. Then you can click on one and it will swap and it will show you this one window from this App Set and the others will go away. I move the pointer over to the left they will appear and I can select another one, like that. So this is just a quick way to multitask using a variety of windows without having to do multiple desktops spaces. It is kind of a one window or small groups of windows at a time approach to multitasking.
Your Mac comes with a variety of productivity apps built into macOS. The simplest one is the Contacts App. This allows you to put contact cards together for each of the people that you email, call, FaceTime with, or otherwise communicate with. Having a good set of contacts is useful here especially your own card because the information there will be used to fill-in forms and various other places.
You've got a Calendar App which you can use to view your events, appointments, and other things. You can do a Day View, a Week View, a Month View and you can easily add events just by double clicking in here, adding a new event. You can have multiple calendars so say for work, for home, for family. You can even share calendars with other Mac users using iCloud. You can have Notification popup to remind you of upcoming events.
The Reminders App is a list or to-do App. You can create various lists here and you can add items to them, have subtasks for those items. You can check them off as you complete them.
The Notes App is more of a free style productivity app. You can create these notes and add text, images, and other elements here including links and such. You can just use these to take notes in meetings and class. Just to make notes to yourself to compile lists of things that don't fit really well into Reminders. All these productivity apps sync over iCloud. So if you are also using iPhone then your notes in the Notes App on your Mac could show up in notes in the Notes App on your iPhone. The same for Reminders, Calendar, and Contacts.
Your Mac also comes with a variety of different communication apps. Let's start with the Mail App here. It's a basic mail client but it has a ton of functionality. If you go to Mail and then Settings you can go to an Accounts Page and there you can add various accounts. You can use the Mail App with more than just Apple's on iCloud email. You can use it with Goggle's Mail, with Microsoft's mail, with any kind of general email system like one at school or at work. Just add a new account here. You can choose from some common email services or add another account and then provide all the information. Then the Mail App can allow you to read right and manage your email.
Safari, of course is the built-in browser in macOS. Most browsers are pretty much the same. Safari has a lot of nice features that work well with other apps on your Mac as well as Safari on your iPhone and iPad. It also works very well for preserving battery life on MacBooks. For that reason alone it is preferred by most Mac users.
There is also an app called Messages on your Mac. This allows you to use Apple's own iMessage System and you can communicate very easily with anybody else with a Mac, iPhone or iPad. But if you have an iPhone you can turn On SMS forwarding and also use the Messages App on your Mac to send SMS messages to anybody with an android phone as well.
Finally, there is FaceTime which is Apple's own video conferencing system. You can also use it for Audio Only calls and it works great between you and anybody else who is also using an Apple product. There are also a variety of other apps that you should know about. If you don't have these on your Mac you can easily get them from The Mac App Store. They are all from Apple. One is the Photos App that is definitely on your Mac. This is your Photo Management Software. Not only can you easily store and organize your photos here but you can go into each individual photo. There are a whole bunch of editing and adjustment tools. There are different ways to Share them as well. There's also Pages which is a word processor and page layout tool. So you can use this to just create very simple documents. You can create letters and you can do more complex things even just some basic desktop publishing can easily be done in the Pages App.
Numbers is Apple's spreadsheet tool and it works a little different than Excel. It also has all these different tables that you can arrange with nice layouts. So you can create different things that look like this or this very easily in Numbers without having a lot of technical skills.
There's also Keynote which is presentation software. It makes it really easy to make presentations not just for meetings or for use in the classroom but also for creating presentations that you can then export as videos and share. There are a ton of different beautiful templates you can use as well.
There's also iMovie which is free video editing software which allows you to take your video clips and arrange them and create really nice looking movies. It has a much shorter learning curve than a lot of the more complex video editing apps.
Hope you found this Quick Start Guide to the Mac useful. I've got thousands of other videos on other Mac topics available. So use those to dig deeper. Thanks for watching. Related Subjects: Finder (286 videos), Mac Basics (34 videos)
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