PDF Magic II

Here’s another incredible time-saver that I discovered by accident. When looking through a PDF file a while back, I was asked to save a single chapter of a handbook which contained 20 or so chapters. I simply opened up the PDF file in Preview, and opened the Sidebar. I went to the first page of this chapter and clicked on this page in the side bar. I scrolled down to the end of the chapter and Shift + Clicked the last page of the chapter in the Sidebar. This meant I had selected the entire chapter in the Sidebar. I then dragged these selected pages onto my desktop and voila! A new PDF file was created containing only those pages I had dragged. I renamed the file, and sent it off by email!

PDF Magic I

I’ve talked about Preview before, and I’ve made no secret that I think it’s one of the best things that your Mac has in it’s application folder. Here’s a trick that found out today by accident. I was asked to make a document in Word, that needed a few full pages from a PDF document. Just on a whim I tried to pull some pages out of my PDF file into my Word document. The following video should show you the result of my experiment!

From the video you can see that my empty Word document is on the left, with 3 empty pages. My PDF document is on the right with 3 pages. Simply pull any page out of the PDF Preview Sidebar, and put it into an empty Word document.

Of course, in this video, I simply take 3 pages and put them into 3 pages into a Word document. This is simply to show you how easy the procedure is. In my own document, I had to mix pages of text, with various pages from the PDF document. The final Word document was saved, and then printed to PDF. Now this is what I call a real time saver.

Quick Preview

The quickest preview in the West!

This one is for those of you with slightly newer computers (ones that were bought within the last two and a half years). I find a lot of time is spent opening documents to see if they are the ones you were in fact looking for. Normally we do thisfrantically under threat of a deadline, and thusly we begin the dance called “was that the file I was looking for?” Not a pretty dance.

Click on a file once and then press the spacebar. You should see a “quick preview” pop up on the screen. You can check the contents of the of the file without opening a program. What a time saver!

The Mac can handle a huge number of files like this, such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint as well as PDF files and images.

Preview Part II

Power Preview!

In the last article, I outlined how you could use the program Preview (which is always found in your Applications folder (shortcut: cmd + shift + a) to do simple editing to your photos. Now is time to turn it up a notch.

Colour Correction

Imagine somebody sends you a picture of a loved one, but it turns out that it’s a very dark picture. You open it up in Preview and can only look at it, wishing you could do something about it. Well you can.



Open your picture in Preview. Now go to Tools and choose Adjust Color. A small floating window will pop up, allowing you to now correct all the different elements of your photo. At first glance it can seem quite complicated. But don’t worry. You’ll see a “Reset All” button at the bottom. Click this at any time to get back to your original photo. A quick tip: Use your Exposure slider to correct dark pictures, and then use the contrast slider to put the finishing touch, but only slide this a small amount.

Converting

When somebody sends you a file, every so often you need to change it’s format. For example, you might get sent a poster by email. When you open it up it looks fine. But when you print it, it might get enlarged, or not look so great. It’s time to convert. Preview makes a great File converter. By far, the most often used conversion is saving things as PDF files. This is as simple as opening up your file, and choose Save As.

If you click on the Format button, you get a list of all the formats that Preview will save in. Your most common format will be PDF, and JPEG (this is the same format as your Digital Camera photos).

Print One Page

This is also a very often used feature on my computer. And incredibly useful as well! Let’s say you get sent a PDF file, a report or something similar. You need to send just the first page (the introduction let’s say) or the last page (the summary) to somebody, but you don’t really need to be sending the 240 page report. Open the PDF, and choose File and then Print. Now instead of pressing print, choose which page you want to print in the pages from and to choices. Next, go down the the bottom right to the PDF button, and choose “Save as PDF”. This is similar to our Print as PDF article, but with a twist of coolness.

Preview - part I

What are you Looking at?

Macs come with an amazing program built right into the system, for free. Free. I thought that might catch your attention…..

When you double click a photo, a picture, or a PDF file, Preview normally opens up. You look at the photo, picture or PDF and then close Preview. Job done. But you can do a whole lot more with Preview. Let me paint the picture:

Rotating

Someone sends you a photo by email, but it’s not the right way up, instead it’s wrongly rotated (you won’t believe how often this happens). Open the photo up with Preview (if it doesn’t open up in Preview see below). Now click the shortcut cmd + r to rotate the picture. You may have to do it a couple of times until the picture is correctly oriented. Now save the picture (cmd + s). Easy.

Cropping

You take a photo, or a screenshot and you notice that you only need a portion of the photo / screenshot. In other words you need to crop or cut away the extra parts of your picture. Make sure that you have the “select” button clicked. Now select the area that you want to keep, and click on Tools and choose “crop” (shortcut cmd + k).



Everything else but the area you wanted to keep now disappears. Save this picture.

Watch out for Part II, where we talk about even more Preview tricks!