2.9 Opening and Saving Your Stuff in an Application

     Almost all OS X applications open and save documents in the same way, whether you’re creating a presentation with Keynote or expressing your cinematic side with iMovie. Therefore, I take a moment to outline the common procedures for opening and saving documents. Believe me, you’ll perform these two rituals dozens of times a week, so no nodding off.

Opening a document

     First, the simple way to load a document: Double-click that document in a Finder window, and . . . well, that’s it. (This is my preferred method because I’m an ALT — short for Admitted Lazy Technowizard — who would rather use complex hand movements to pour myself another Diet Coke.)

     To open a document the hard way — from inside an application — here’s the plan:

1. Choose File➪Open or press that handy ⌘+O key combination.
     Your OS X program is likely to display the attractive Open dialog that you see in Figure 2-18.
     Many applications now allow you to open files that have been saved to your iCloud Library — click the iCloud button at the top-left corner of the Open dialog to display documents in your Library that you can open in this application, or click the On My Mac button to locate and open files on your Mac’s drive or on your local network. Figure 2-18 illustrates the On My Mac face of the Open dialog.

        2. Navigate to the location of the document that you want to open.

     The pop-up menu allows you to jump directly to common locations — such as the Desktop, your Home folder, and your Documents folder — as well as places that you’ve recently accessed (Recent Places).
     If the target folder isn’t in your pop-up menu, it’s time to use the Open dialog sidebar, where your hard drives, DVD drives, and network locations hang out.
     You can quickly locate a document by clicking in the Search box at the upper right of the Open dialog and typing a portion of the filename or a phrase contained in the document.
3. Click the habitat where the file will be found.
     If you’re using Column view, you’ll note that the right column(s) will change to show you the contents of the item that you just clicked. In this way, you can cruise through successive folders to find that elusive document. (This  time-consuming process is derisively called “drilling,” hence, the importance of using Recent Items, or dragging files, locations, and applications into the sidebar at the left of Finder.)
4. When you sight the document that you want to load, either doubleclick it or click once to highlight the filename and then click Open.

     “Hey, the Open dialog can be resized!” That’s right, good buddy. You can expand the Open dialog to show more columns and find things more easily. Click and drag any side or corner of the Open dialog to resize it. (You can also switch from Column view to List view or Icon view or Flow view, just as you can in a Finder window, using the buttons to the left of the pop-up location menu. I discuss setting view modes in a Finder window in Book II, Chapter 1.)

Saving a document

     To save a document, follow these steps:

1. Choose File➪Save.
     If you’ve previously saved this document, your application should immediately overwrite the existing document with the new copy, and you get to return to work . . . end of story. If you haven’t saved this document, the program will display a Save dialog that’s usually similar to the Open dialog; it generally has a few more options, however, so stay frosty.
2. Navigate to the location where you’d like to save the document and then type a filename.
     Often, you can use a default name provided by the thoughtful folks who developed the software. Note that you might be given the chance to save the document in one of several formats. For example, a word-processing application might allow you to save a document in RTF, HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and even bargain-basement text format. (Typically, I don’t change the format unless I specifically need to change it.)
3. Click Save (or OK, depending on the application).

     If an application offers a Save As menu option in the File menu, you can (in effect) copy the document by saving a new version of the document under another name. Save As comes in handy when you want to retain the original version of a document. Alternatively, use the Save menu option (in applications that support this Mavericks feature), and you can open different versions of the document instead.