Opening and saving files - Mac OS Tutorial

- [Instructor] Just about any time you work with an application in which you are creating, editing, or otherwise modifying some kind of content you'll be producing and saving your work as files. For example, when you type up a report in a word processor the report is saved as an individual file, which you can then reopen in the application to continue working on it. Or if you're editing a video you shot of your family vacation you're saving the video project as a file too. So it's important to understand the basic concepts involved in opening and saving files. For this example I'm going to open up the built-in application called TextEdit. You'll find that in your Applications folder. I've already added that to my dock, so I'll open it from here. And I'll choose to create a new blank document. Now in some programs to create a new document or other project file you need to choose File, New, which you can see generates another blank document. But I already have one in the background here, so I'm going to close this new one. And I'll just type a few words here. Now any time you're actively working on a document or project it's a good practice to save your file periodically, so you don't lose your work should the electricity go out. To save what I've written so far I'll choose File, Save. Because this is a brand new document I'm prompted to name the file and choose a place on my Mac to save it. I'll just call this short story. And I'm going to choose to save this on my Desktop for convenience. I'm also going to expand this Save dialog box so we can see more of it. This allows you to choose other locations where you might want to save your file and also shows you some more options. Notice this checkbox down here that says Hide file extension. I'm going to uncheck that. Now my file name ends with .rtf. That RTF is a file extension. The purpose of including a file extension in the name of your file is to identify what kind of file this is. So if it needs to be opened by someone else their computer has a better chance of knowing what application to use to open it. In this case I'm creating a Rich Text File, which is RTF. TextEdit can also create plain text files, which are .txts. Microsoft Word files are .docs, Adobe Photoshop files are .psds, and so on. Each type of file format has its own extension. Now Macs give you the option to hide your extensions and for the most part Macs are able to open files with hidden extensions with the right application. But if you have to share this file with someone running Windows their computer might not know what application to use. So I always leave this option unchecked and I suggest you do too. It also just makes it easier to tell at a glance what type of file you're looking at in case the thumbnail doesn't make it clear. All right, so I've named my file, I'm saving it to my Desktop, I've unhidden the extension, and I'll click Save. So now my document is saved and you can see it's sitting here on the Desktop. Now I'm going to close this document for a moment. TextEdit is still running, but no documents are open right now. Remember, you can tell which application you're currently working with by looking up here in the upper left hand corner. Now some applications on the Mac, TextEdit included, will automatically quit if you don't have any open windows in them and you switch to another application. But I'll stay in TextEdit for the moment. So if I want to reopen the file I just saved I have a couple of choices. I can choose File, Open, which will let me browse through my computer to find the file wherever I saved it. This is a good choice if you're opening an older file. Let's cancel that. I'll just click Done. A faster way to open a file you were recently working on is to choose File, Open Recent, and here you can see my file is listed at the top here. All I have to do is select it and it opens up, ready for me to continue working on it. The Open Recent command is fairly common across all types of applications. But what if I've already quit TextEdit? Well, I could just reopen TextEdit and choose Open Recent again, but in this case the file I want to open is right here on my Desktop. If the file you want to open is on your Desktop or in some other open folder window just double-click it. That simultaneously launches in this case the TextEdit application and then opens the file I double-clicked. So double-clicking the file should open the right application in most cases, especially if you followed my advice to keep the file extension visible. It is possible that the wrong application might launch in some cases or that you might want to open a file in a different application. For example, you might have an image file that you edited in a photo editing application, like Photoshop, that you then want to open in the Mac app called Preview. One solution is just to quit the application you don't want and open the correct application and then use the File, Open command to open that file from that application. Another option is to right-click the file. Remember how I've been emphasizing the usefulness of right-clicking. And from here I can choose Open With and then select the app I want to use to open the file. So you can see TextEdit is the default, but then it gives me this entire list of other apps on my computer it thinks might be able to open the file. If none of those match up I can also choose Other and pick a specific app that I want to open the file with. I'll just Cancel that for now. But those are the basic things you should understand about opening and saving files. What I've shown you here applies to almost every application out there. You will find some applications that save your files or data automatically and don't even offer a save command so you can do it yourself, but those are much more rare and you should still get into the habit of saving your files regularly while working on them.