Latest Posts in Mac OS X Hints

Alternative methods of zooming in Excel 2008

One of the things I don’t like about Excel 2008 is that setting zoom levels is a bit more complex than it need be. If you use Excel’s View -> Zoom menu, this opens a new window, from which you then need to select a radio button, or type in your custom zoom level. If you use the toolbar’s Zoom icon, you’re limited to a few settings without the ability to choose a custom zoom level. So here are two additional methods of zooming that I find simpler to use.

If you’ve got a scroll wheel mouse—and really, if you don’t, you should get one as they’re great timesavers—you can zoom the active worksheet in Excel by holding Control and Command and then moving your scroll wheel up (increase zoom) or down (decrease zoom).

This is my preferred solution, as it offers the most zoom levels—using my mouse, the size increases or decreases in 15% steps, and there are no maximums or minimums. (As we discussed a couple of years ago, this also works in Excel 2004.)

The other solution is to add the Zoom In and Zoom Out commands to a menu in Excel, and then assign them a keyboard shortcut.

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Quickly reveal obscured desktop icons

Given the plethora of other Mac news likely to appear Tuesday, this Mac OS X Hint is short, sweet, and to the point. As you know—I hope—OS X allows you to move the dock to any edge of the screen you like—left, bottom, or right. However, if you move the dock from the bottom of the screen to a screen edge, it will cover any icons you have on your desktop on that edge of the screen. (The right edge is usually more troublesome in this regard, as that’s where icons appear by default).

You can hide the dock, of course, to get access to the obscured icons, but that’s a bit of a hacky solution. Instead, just select View -> Clean Up, and the obscured icons will magically move out from under the dock. Why this doesn’t happen automatically is an open question, but at least the solution is relatively painless.

Group movies into folders on Apple TV

Today’s hint is tangentially related to OS X, in that it uses iTunes, but it will really be of interest only to Apple TV owners. One of my issues with the Apple TV has been the inability to easily organize my movies, leading to a long list of entries in the My Movies section of the interface. As of Apple TV’s 2.3 software update, however, that problem has been solved. You can now arbitrarily group movies into folders, just by adding a certain tag in iTunes. So instead of seeing the 19 separate entries for your James Bond movies, you can instead see a James Bond folder at the top level. Navigate into that folder on the Apple TV, and you’ll find the individual movies. To me, this makes the My Movies interface a lot cleaner and easier to navigate.

To group your movies on the Apple TV, open iTunes and select the Movies library. Now Command-click on the movies you’d like to group into a folder, and then press Command-I to open the Multiple Item Information dialog. On the Video tab, put the name you’d like to use for your folder—James Bond movies or something similarly inspired—in the Show field, then click OK.

Now re-sync your Apple TV (in the Devices section of iTunes, select the Apple TV and click Sync) and you’re done.

When you go to the My Movies section on your Apple TV, you should see your newly-created show. In the image at right (click it for a larger version), the top half of the image shows the Multiple Item Information dialog, and the bottom shows a (bad) picture of the contents of the folder on my Apple TV.

With this simple change, my Apple TV’s My Movies section no longer feels like an unorganized mess…now it’s an organized mess!

Set half-star ratings directly in iTunes

iTunes has long supported the ability to rate (and display) half-star ratings for songs, but until recently, you had to use an AppleScript to actually set those half-star ratings. Now, thanks to a hidden iTunes preference, you can set half-star ratings directly within iTunes.

To enable this feature, first quit iTunes, then open Terminal. In Terminal, enter this command, then press Return:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes allow-half-stars -bool TRUE

Now relaunch iTunes, and nothing will seem to have changed. But click-and-drag (slowly) on a song’s Rating field, and you’ll see little ½ indicators as you drag across the rating. (You can also try clicking directly between stars, but I find this more difficult than dragging to a half-star position.) If you found the five-step ratings scale too limiting before, you can now rejoice in the new ten-step version.

If you ever tire of the half-star steps, quit iTunes, open Terminal, and repeat the above command, but replace TRUE with FALSE. Today’s hint has been covered in a few spots on the web, including right here in the discussion thread for our hint on finding hidden preferences by reader ScottBayes, but I felt it useful enough to share as a general hints blog.

Print non-contiguous pages in Leopard’s Preview

One of the handy new features in the OS X 10.5 version of Preview—I’m pretty sure this is 10.5-only, at least—is the ability to selectively print pages directly from Preview. While you can use the Print dialog in any program to print one or a range of pages, you can’t use it to print a non-contiguous selection of pages—say pages two, four and five, and nine. But using Preview, you can do just that.

Open your multi-page PDF in Preview, hold down the Command key, and click on each page you’d like to print. With more than one page selected, the File -> Print menu item changes to read File -> Print Select Pages. Choose that, or just press Command-P, and you’ll print the selected pages.

This trick proves really useful when printing Web pages. When I want to print something from the Web, I always first print it to a PDF, to see how it’s going to look, because some Web sites don’t print well at all. But once you’re in Preview, there’s no access to the Print dialog; if you click the Print button, the print job starts. By using the Command-click trick, you can choose exactly which of the site’s pages you’d like to print, right from Preview.

But what if you want to print just one page from the Web site? You might think you could Command-click on that one page and select Print…but that won’t work. With just one page selected, Preview will revert to printing the entire document. If you had access to the Print dialog, this wouldn’t be a problem…but because you printed to a PDF, you don’t.

The solution? Hold down Command and click on every page except the one you want to print, then hit Command-Delete. This will delete the selected pages, leaving just the one page you want to print. Please note that if you’re doing this on a file you’ve saved, you do not want to save the changes you’ve made—if you do, the pages you deleted will be gone for good! (But really, in the case of a saved document, you should just use the Print dialog to specify the one page you want to print.)

So the next time you need to print a non-contiguous range of pages—or just one page from a Web site—in Preview, use the Command key to get the (print) job done.

Easily copy passwords in Keychain Access

As you’re probably aware, many OS X applications and features use the system’s built-in keychain to securely store your usernames and passwords—programs like Safari and Mail, and login information for other Macs on your network are but a few examples. You can see and work with this stored information using the Keychain Access program, in the Applications -> Utilities folder. If you’ve ever forgotten a password, for instance, you can look it up in Keychain Access.

Until just recently, I would look up forgotten passwords by double-clicking the appropriate account in Keychain Access, clicking the Show Password box in the new dialog that opened, entering my admin password in the authorization dialog that appeared, then selecting and copying the now-visible password. Ugh. I was sure there must be an easier way, but nothing in the program’s menus seemed to do the trick.

Then a friend pointed me to a much simpler—and for some of you, probably amazingly obvious—method of doing the same thing. In the long list of accounts in Keychain Access, control-click (or right-click) on the account’s name, and select Copy Password to Clipoard from the contextual menu. Enter your admin password in the authorization box and press Return, and you’re done—the password is now on your clipboard.

This feature has existed at least since OS X 10.4, but I only learned of it just recently—yet another reason why I dislike features that only exist in contextual menus!

Temporarily disable laptop screen dimming

If you use a laptop on battery power, you’re probably well aware of its penchant for slightly dimming the screen after a period of inactivity. This dimming helps reduce energy consumption, thereby stretching battery life. It can also be very annoying when it happens in the middle of reading a long story on a web page, for instance. To remove the annoyance, you can permanently disable this feature, as you may already know. Just open the Energy Saver System Preferences panel, select Battery settings, click the Options tab, then uncheck ‘Automatically reduce the brightness of the display before display sleep.’

If you permanently disable this feature, though, you’ll lose its battery-saving benefits even when it makes sense—like when you walk away from your machine for a minute or two. A nicer solution would be a way to temporarily disable it when you don’t want it active. It turns out you can do just that with the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences panel.

Open that panel, click on the Screen Saver tab, then click on the Hot Corners button. In the new sheet that drops down, decide which screen corner you’d like to use (I use the upper right corner), then click the menu button next to that corner. On the menu that appears, select Disable Screen Saver and click OK.

From now on, when you start reading a long document—or do anything else where you’d rather not have the screen go dim—just flick the mouse into your “do not activate” corner, and the screen will no longer dim. (And, it should go without saying, the screen saver will not come on.) After you’re done reading, move the mouse out of the hot corner, and the screen dimming function will again be active.

Repairing corrupt Mail attachments

A while back, I was having a strange issue with PDF attachments in Mail, but only on my MacBook Pro. I’d open an e-mail with an attached PDF, and Mail would show the file’s name, but instead of seeing a preview of the document, I’d see a small (10x10 pixel) black square. If I tried to save the PDF to the Finder, and then open it in Preview or Reader, I’d get a message stating that the PDF was corrupt. On any other Mac in the house, though, that very same PDF attachment both previewed and opened just fine. (I use IMAP, so the e-mail is the same physical message on all the machines, as it resides on the server. This hint probably won’t help for POP accounts, in which the message is removed from the server when downloaded.)

You may see problems with other forms of attachments—a Word document that appears as a long garbled string of text, for instance. I mainly receive PDF attachments, though, and that’s where I’ve noticed the problem on my Mac.

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Start iChat without logging into accounts

If you use iChat (or Adium—this hint works for that program as well) and have multiple accounts, there may be times when you want to log in to one account, but not the rest. Most of the time, though, you log in to all your accounts—so you’ve left the “automatically log in” setting enabled on each of your accounts. As an example, you may have a work account and a personal account, and would rather not log into the work account on the weekends. You could change the setting in iChat’s preferences, but that’s hardly an ideal solution.

You could also manually log out of each account you’d rather not be logged into, but this is a bit of a pain—and it will ‘flash’ your availability to everyone on your buddy list before you log out. Instead, try this alternative. Start iChat (or Adium) while holding down the Shift key. When iChat (or Adium) launches, none of your accounts will be logged in; you can then manually log in to only those accounts you’d like to activate.

While this may not seem any simpler than starting with all accounts logged in and logging out of those you don’t want, this method saves a needless login—and insures you won’t accidentally leave an account in a logged in state.

Assign Finder labels via the keyboard

As someone who prefers using the keyboard over the mouse, the Finder’s color labels annoy me to no end—there’s simply no way to use the keyboard to assign them. You can open the Get Info window by pressing Command-I, but neither the arrow keys nor Tab key will select the label section of the Get Info window. The same holds true for the Finder’s contextual menu—you can use Tab to move through it, but the highlight will skip right over the label section.

But using a bit of AppleScript and Butler, my favorite do-it-all utility, it’s possible to implement your own keyboard-friendly method of applying color labels in the Finder. With some modifications, this hint should work with other utilities such as Quicksilver, LaunchBar, and any other program that can assign keyboard shortcuts to AppleScripts.

The basics of the hint are fairly straightforward: in Butler, we’ll create a new AppleScript item, and insert some code to assign a color to the selected file (or files) in the Finder.

I’ll walk through that process in detail, then I’ll offer up an easy way to add a full set of color label scripts to Butler’s configuration. If you’re only interested in the ready-to-use Butler add-in, skip to the end of this hint; the following is for those interested in how this works.

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