Navigating an Apple computer

What we are going to do now is to have a brief look at how to navigate through your Apple computer. If you look through on the screen here, there are lots of different icons, these are different folders and programmes that are on the computer that will be used regularly, so you can access them here, we have got some PowerPoints, we have got a video and also some folders that we would need to access and you can adjust these from the finder.

So if you just click on the finder, it opens up, and if we just go down to the desktop, you will see all the icons in this box here are exactly the same as the ones over on the right-hand side. So if there is something I am using very regularly, I can put that on to the desktop, and I can see it whenever I want to. It is a lot quicker. It is a much quicker, easier way to access a file or information.

Other things on here are the Apple icon at the top left-hand side. If we click on that, there are lots of different options. It will tell you about your Mac, so if we click on that, it tells you the version you are on, what type of programme, so here we have got the version number we are on, other information about the computer itself, it tells us the size of the hard drive of the computer, the programmes that we are dealing with. And also along here, we can look at the displays, storage and we can see how much the computer has been, data has been used already, so how much room I have got left on it. If it is too high, I might need to clean the computer and get some information off of it.

Support, so we can get information about how to get help with our machine. And also the final one there is service and that would come up with information about any service plans you have. In this particular computer, we do not have it on there, so you can see it says it has expired.

If you want to close down any of these windows, just hit the red button on the top left-hand corner and it vanishes. Let us just go back to that Apple icon on the top left. Also down here, we can look at different things, so one of them is system preferences. Now, we will look at this in more detail later on, but this is where we can access lots of different areas, so we can look at printers, we can look at the touch ID that is on this computer here, notifications, updates and things like that. So that is the system preferences. And if we go on to something on here, so if we want to click on the one that goes to the printers, we can get back by either clicking the back arrow or these little dots here and that will take you back onto the main screen.

Other things under the Apple icon, we can look at recent items that we have seen, we can close programmes down, what they call force quit programmes, which is if you are having trouble shutting something down, you can use that, we can put the computer to sleep, we can restart it or shut it down. Sleep would mean we just, the computer shuts down when we just close the lid on this, the laptop, or if it is a desktop computer, again, it would just put it to sleep and all the monitors would turn off or shut down, gives a full restart, so it literally just goes down to the base level, turned off and then we need to do a full turn on when we come back. We can also lock the screen and we can also log in and out.

Along here, we have got the finder section, which we have looked at earlier, where we can access anything within the finder and there are lots of other icons here, you can see where we can get access to, including the help screen, so it is very useful when you are searching for something, you can put information on there. On the top right-hand side of the screen, we have got the current date and the time, so you can click on that and you can come up with other information. You can pre-set the computers to show world times and news stories and things like that as well.

Another icon along the top is Siri. So if we click that one, it will open up with Siri and if you just follow them along, different computers will have different things open, search boxes on here, so let us click that and we can search the entire computer for a programme. Backups. So this will run with different back-ups on the computer, the battery level and you can also set the computers to show you in number format how much potential of battery power you have got. This icon here is the Wi-Fi connection, so here we are connected to a network, but we can connect to other networks if you want, and then any Bluetooth things you have got, maybe an external keypad or an external mouse. This one here is the volume control, so you can click that and you can adjust the actual volume by just sliding this button up and down and also you can see if it has got any external speakers or if you are using headsets and things like that as well.

So there are different other icons along here, depending on what programmes you are running. Along the bottom, you have the main programmes, so on the left-hand side is the finder, which is where you will search all your folders. You can see here, we have got a cloud drive, other areas, you can tag things as well, so we can find any important things much, much quicker. Then we have Siri, which we can use to help if you want to use it to talk to the computer and help find stuff. The launchpad is where all the programmes are, so if you click that, you will see these are all the programmes that are installed on this computer. So we have got Firefox as a programme, we have got iMovie, Podcast, Apple Music, Photos and lots of other things. And if you just slide along, we can see there are other ones on here as well, whether we want to have Microsoft Outlook or Excel, some programmes for Word documents and PowerPoints.

So to get out of that, you can just click away from it or you can hit the escape button. Along the bottom then are the programmes. Now, these programmes along here are the ones that we are using and you can adjust these as well. So if you do not want them or you want to move them, so if you want to move this one here, you just click and hold on it, and you can remove it from the dock, in other words, remove it from this bottom line here, or we can automatically open it every single time. There is Mail, there is Calendar and we can drag these if we want and move them. So if we do not like the order that they are in, we can change that around as well.

System preferences here is exactly the same as we looked at when we clicked the top, it is another way of accessing that information. Along with further to the right, you have got the bin, which is where all the files that you delete go and then you have to delete them from there. And here is a little line, there is that small line between we have got here the Firefox icon. And what you can do is you can increase the size of those graphics, make them smaller and larger, depending on how big you want them to appear on your screen.

Now, there are lots of other settings you can do on the computer, but you need to go into the main settings and work through them. We will look at those in other videos.