| The Wonders of Spotlight |

In Leopard, spotlight can be a handy tool in times of need. You can find the Spotlight tab at the top right of your screen. It can be used to locate files and folders on your Mac. But it can also be used as a calculator just by typing in the equation you need to be solved and it does the rest. You can even do some complex calculations like square roots! Try typing sqrt(625).

| Where's Your Backup? |

One of the most important things you can do for you Mac is to back up your data. One very easy way to do that is to copy your data to an external Hard Drive. There are several FREE applications that will let you do this including, SuperDuper, Carbon Copy Cloner, and if you are running OSX 10.5 Leopard there is Time Machine® built in. If you need any help creating and maintaining your backups, don't hesitate to call us.

| The power of the space bar |

In Leopard, by striking the space bar when any object is selected the finder will open a large thumbnail showing information about the object. When a file, such as audio, images, PDF's, text documents and movies, is selected the spacebar function will let you preview or play the file without opening any applications. This will save users a large amount of wasted time when waiting for an application to launch, adding to the efficiency of the workflow.

| Keyboard shortcuts |

New to Leopard and can't figure out all of the new key commands yet? Here is a list of the top 10 easy and most useful shortcuts...

1) Command + C to copy to clipboard
2) Command + V to past from clipboard
3) Command + Q to quit an open application
4) Command + H to hide most open applications
5)a. Command + Shift + 3 to capture a “whole screen” shot
   b. Command + Shift + 4 to capture any portion of the screen
   c. Command + Shift + 4 then press Space to capture just a window
6) Command + Tab to switch to open applications
7) Command + Shift + A opens the Application folder
8) Command + Spacebar opens the spotlight search
9) Command + Delete to delete files and folders
10) Command + Shift + Delete to empty the trash without warning

In Addition, here is a link to 190 other fun and interesting Leopard shortcuts.

Remove that Pesky Printer Icon

Unlike the older versions of OS X, in Leopard, when a job is sent to the printer, by default the printer icon appears in the dock and will remain there until it is manually closed. This can be quite annoying to many people, myself included, if you do not like to have your dock cluttered with open applications. The solution is to control click on the printer icon after it appears in your dock and select Auto Quit from the menu. Once Auto Quit is enabled the icon will disappear after the job has been printed.