Quicklook is one of the great new features in Mac OS X Leopard operating system. Learn some neat short cuts and how best to use it to quickly read your documents.


More DIY videos at 5min.com

Video Transcription

Operator: Mac 411, how can I help you? Male: I have a question about Quicklook. I really liked the new feature in Mac OS X, however, how can I view more than one document type at a time? Operator: Let me show you how. Okay. So, here we are in my desktop and I am going to go and open up a folder. I have put up a folder together of some sample files. And as you can see, I have a variety of files here. They are Word Document from Microsoft, mp3, CR2 which is my raw file from a Canon camera, an MOV, a Keynote file, a PDF file, another Word Document, and a JPEG. So, the old fashion way to look at these files or documents would be to double click on them. You can see a very small preview there. But with the new Quicklook, you can actually check out all these files and their content without having to open up the actual application that created those files. So, there are three ways of looking at these files. The first way is, you see this little, almost “i” like button. If you click on that, that will open up your Quicklook and you can see here that it is just Quicklook slideshow. The other way is by selecting the file that you want to do a Quicklook on and pressing the spacebar. And the third way is to go to file down to Quicklook and then it will bring it up. Now, you can look at a single document at a time or multiple documents at a time. So for example, I am going to click on this Word Document. I am going to click the spacebar because that is my favorite way of looking at Quicklook. And when they do that, I am going to do that, I am going to go ahead and resize this so it fits in within my screen capture. You can see my Quicklook here and it opened up the actual document. I can actually scroll through all the pages and that word document by using the scrollbar here on the right and you can see that I am just scrolling. And then, you can go ahead and just click X at the top to close that up. If I want to listen to an mp3, I can do that. Click the spacebar and it automatically turns into an mp3 player. The same thing with a movie, Quicktime, I can click on the space. Now, this is HD so I am going to resize it here and it turns into an actual player. So, the Quicklook will actually morph into the type of application or type of document that it needs to play through it. Now, one of the cool ways of viewing a document is also by selecting all the documents that you want to view and then hitting the spacebar. And then, what is going to happen is, you will see a little index sheet. So what I can do is I can click on my index sheet and there are all the documents that I selected. And then if I just want to see this document versus this one or this one or this one, I would just click and it automatically takes me to it. I can go back to my index sheet again and then it will all take me back there. I can now select this. I can watch this Quicktime movie or I can click on next which will take me to the next file that I have selected. Now, there is a Keynote presentation that is set up pretty large. If I click on next again, it is going to take me to a PDF version of the Keynote presentation that I put together. Now, what is interesting here and what I want to share with you is a shortcut or a way to zoom in and zoom in PDFs and I have only found this to work with PDF documents. But, if you hit command and the plus or the equal key, you can actually start zooming into the PDF or zooming out of the PDF by hitting command minus. So, that is a pretty neat way of getting in and out of certain documents if you cannot really read it because the writing is kind of small. That would be great if this would work with all sorts of documents. But so far, I have only found it to work with PDFs at this time. Now, since we are talking about shortcuts, there are some shortcuts that I would like to share with you. I have already shared with you about the command plus or command minus to zoom in and out. There is also the command right and left arrow keys. So, command right will take me to the next document and command left will take me to the previous d