Speed Up Your Mac (#2)

Updated December 7th, 2015.

As we’ve seen before, sometimes it’s not the Mac that’s slow. Sometimes it’s the user. Even if you’re fast you can get a little faster still. Here’s another hint that will save you time, day after day after day. It’s all about checking boxes. Read on.

The typical Print… dialog box looks something like this:

See those checkboxes at the bottom? I’ve marked them with red. Let’s say you want to check them. Do you carefully position the pointer inside those little square checkboxes? Well, you could, and it would work– but that isn’t something you can do in a hurry (especially if you’re using a trackpad instead of a mouse). FYI, I NEVER click in the boxes. I click near them, but not “in” them.

That’s because you can click anywhere in the words beside the checkboxes (shown in purple in the picture below).

That’s a much bigger target– more than ten times as big! It’s easier to hit a big target, and easier means faster. This works (or it should work) for ANY checkbox (and for radio buttons too), in any program. Give it a try and save a few seconds multiple times a day. It doesn’t sound like much but it all adds up.

Bonus: if your Print… dialogs aren’t nice and big like the ones shown here you need to click the little black triangle in the blue square, shown below and marked in purple. There is a shortcut for clicking that triangle, but since you only need to do it once per program (and since it’s a multi-step shortcut) I’d just click the thing and be done with it.

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