davintosh

Here’s one place where the Macintosh really, really shines compared to Windows…

Let’s say you have a document open in Word or Excel or PowerPoint, on either platform. Like many users, you just fired up the app and opened it through the handy-dandy Recent Documents list, just like you’ve done daily since you originated that document a month or so ago. And like many users you have no clue where on your hard drive you saved that particular file. But now, Gertrude in the next cubicle, or Hector in the Mexico City office, needs a copy of that file… How do you figure out where to find it?

On the Mac, just hold down the Command (Apple) key and click on the document title bar. A menu showing every step in the file path drops down. Pull down and click in any step in that menu, and you’re taken to that directory/folder. While it’s not exactly intuitive — you probably won’t find that trick in any of the Office apps’ menus — it’s easy as can be once you know it. Once you see the file, you can copy it to a flash drive, drag it to an email message, burn it to a CD, or whatever.

If you’re on a PC, well, it’s a different story. Emailing the file is pretty straightforward; click on the Office Button (in Office 2007) then pull down to Send — Email. That still doesn’t tell you where you can find the file, but Microsoft dumbs down that process enough to make it work. But what if you really need to burn that file to a CD or copy it to a thumb drive… how do you track down the location of the file?

Not sure if this is the best way, but after much digging around in the Office 2007 menus, what I found is that you can click on the Office Button (in Office 2007) then pull down to Prepare — Properties; that opens up a Document Properties bar just below The Ribbon, which includes a Location: field that shows the full file path for the file. From there you can select & copy the path, then paste it into an Explorer window. Yeah. That’s intuitive.

These examples refer to the Microsoft Office suite in both the Mac OS and in Windows; the same trick works in all apps on the Mac because it’s part of the OS. In Windows… the same trick will likely take different steps in different apps. That’s just the way it works in Winders.

And once again, the Mac OS smacks the snot out of Windows.

Tags: Mac, UI, Windows

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Computers, Cool Technology, Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.