Learn How to Paste Text So Its Style Matches the Surrounding Text

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When you copy text from a Web page, PDF, or word processing document, macOS usually includes the associated formatting, so the words you paste may end up in 68-point blue italic if that was what the source text looked like. That’s often undesirable. More commonly, you want the text to take on the styling of the text where you’ve pasted it. In most Mac apps, there’s a quick trick to achieve this goal. Look on the Edit menu for the Paste and Match Style command (sometimes called Paste and Match Formatting, Paste Text Only, or Paste without Formatting) to paste the text such that it matches the style of the surrounding words in the destination. Apple’s standard keyboard shortcut for this is Command-Shift-Option-V, though some apps use Command-Shift-V. If you regularly need this capability in an app that lacks native support for it, consider using a clipboard utility app, like Keyboard Maestro, to make your own universal Paste Text Only hotkey.

(Featured image based on an original from Pixabay)

Intuit Has Stopped Updating the QuickBooks Online Mac App; Switch to a Web Browser

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If you’re using QuickBooks Online with the service’s Mac app to manage your business’s accounting, you may have seen a message like the one below announcing that Intuit has stopped updating the QuickBooks Online app. This doesn’t affect your QuickBooks Online account, which you can and should use via a Web browser at qbo.intuit.com now. Even if the QuickBooks Online Mac app continues to work, which it likely will for some time, we recommend that you delete it and switch entirely to a Web browser. It’s not safe to use an unsupported app for financial records because Intuit won’t be fixing any security vulnerabilities going forward.

(Featured image based on an original by RODNAE Productions from Pexels)

Use Messages to Share Your Current Location Quickly

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We’ve all gotten that panicked “Where are you?!?” text message at some point. Sometimes it’s an easy question to answer, but at other times, the answer is “Well, right here, wherever that is.” That’s unsatisfying, of course, but using Messages on your iPhone, you can do better. Tap the person’s name at the top of the conversation, tap the Info button, and in the screen that appears, tap Send My Current Location. Messages immediately sends a little thumbnail map showing where you are, and if the recipient taps it, they can see a larger map, get directions, or open it in Maps. It’s a brilliant little feature!

(Featured image by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels)

Four Ways to Reduce Zoom Fatigue

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After a long day of video calls, you might feel like your brain has been wrung out like a wet washcloth—we certainly do. It’s exhausting to stare into a computer for hours every day while participating in meetings or classes. This condition is called Zoom fatigue, and it’s a recent affliction for most of us because the pandemic has dramatically increased the popularity of video calls. We don’t mean to beat on Zoom here—this condition plagues people who use Cisco WebEx, FaceTime, Google Hangouts, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Skype, and other videoconferencing software too.

But there are techniques you can employ to reduce Zoom fatigue. Researchers at Stanford University have identified four reasons why video calls are so tiring and offer suggestions on making them less so. They include:

  • Close-up eye contact is overwhelming. You usually sit about an arm’s length from your computer display, and if one person is on screen at a time, their head may be close to life-size. You’d never be that near someone’s face in real life unless they were a close family member, and even then, you wouldn’t hold that position for long. Shrink your window or switch to gallery view so you’re talking to postage stamps rather than feeling like someone is up in your face.
  • Looking at yourself is psychologically harmful. We all have mirrors, but can you imagine staring into one for hours every day? Only a pathological narcissist would do that. Worse, constantly seeing your own image can make you worry about your appearance and what others think of you. Once you’ve verified that you’re properly framed and don’t have salad in your teeth, hide your preview or switch to a view that doesn’t include you.
  • Sitting perfectly still is difficult. This is hardest on kids, but even adults have trouble staying sufficiently still to remain perfectly framed in a video window. When you’re on a standard phone call or in an in-person meeting, you might pace around the room or at least adjust your position in your chair. Try turning off your camera when possible—most calls work just as well without video—or position it so you can fidget or pace in person. Another solution is Apple’s Center Stage technology on the new M1-based iPad Pros, which automatically pans and zooms to keep you in the picture as you move around.
  • Video calls make you constantly think about call mechanics. There’s nothing natural about interacting with multiple people on a screen, so we’ve all come up with behaviors (some of which we just recommended!) to smooth over the cracks in the system. For instance, your brain has to expend extra effort to help you stay framed in the video window, worry about how you look, use exaggerated facial expressions so people know you’re paying attention, and use techniques like a thumbs-up to indicate approval without unmuting. The solution is to turn off your camera and hide the video window so your brain can take a break and focus on just the audio content of the call.

You’ll notice that most of the recommendations for reducing the mental strain of video calls come down to eliminating video. It shouldn’t be surprising because talking on the phone isn’t nearly as tiring, even when you’re on a conference call with a couple of people. There’s no question that video can help convey information that would be lost in a phone call, and it’s nice to see far-flung friends and family, but there’s no rule that video calls are the best form of communication for all situations.

We’ve started to put these recommendations into practice ourselves, and we encourage you to do so as well. And if you need support for why you’re turning off your camera or asking for audio-only calls, send people a link to this article.

(Featured image by Anna Shvets from Pexels)

Nine Reasons to Put Your Mac’s Pointer in a Corner

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Nine Reasons to Put Your Mac’s Pointer in a Corner

If your Mac is like ours, it’s a busy place, with oodles of open windows and lots of icons lying around. If you want to display the Desktop or see a single app’s windows, you may find yourself clicking around or using keyboard shortcuts, but did you know that you can access many of the Mac’s special views with just a flick of your wrist—no click necessary?

A long-standing but little-known feature called Hot Corners makes this possible. The key to unlocking Hot Corners is in System Preferences, in either the Desktop & Screen Saver or Mission Control pane. In either one, click the Hot Corners button to set up your hot corners.

The Hot Corners dialog displays a pop-up menu for each of the four corners of your screen. Choose an action in one of those menus, and that’s what happens when you move your pointer to that corner. A hyphen, the default, means nothing happens.

Here’s the scoop on each action. To exit these special views, switch to another app, press the Escape key, put the pointer back in the hot corner again, or just move the mouse.

Mission Control

Use a hot corner to enter this bird’s-eye view of all your Mac’s open windows. Once you’re in Mission Control, you can switch to any window by clicking it. (Preview a window by hovering over it and pressing the Space bar.) You can also set up spaces in Mission Control—a space is a view that contains only windows from the apps assigned to that space. Click the plus sign in the top-left corner and then drag windows up into the new space. Switch to a space by clicking it in the top bar.

Application Windows

For an overview of all open windows for a particular app (Safari, in this case), use a hot corner to invoke Application Windows. This view displays thumbnails of all open windows in the current app. For some apps, like Pages, you’ll also see thumbnails of recently opened documents at the bottom of the view. Click any thumbnail to switch to it.

Desktop

If you like storing documents for in-progress projects on your Desktop, you’ll love the hot corner that invokes Desktop view. It moves all open windows aside, letting you focus on the icons on the Desktop. The windows return when you switch to an app.

Notification Center

Since you can so easily open Notification Center by clicking the date and time (in macOS 11 Big Sur; in earlier versions of macOS, click the Notification Center icon) in the upper-right corner of your menu bar, it may not be worth wasting a hot corner on it. In Big Sur, Notification Center combines the Today and Notifications views from previous versions of macOS, with iOS-like widgets underneath the most recent notifications. You can control which apps can display notifications in System Preferences > Notifications. To add, remove, or rearrange widgets, click the Edit Widgets button at the bottom of Notification Center.

Start Screen Saver

Screen savers are more than just eye-candy you can use to personalize your Mac—they also serve to conceal the contents of your screen from people who might walk by when you’re not there. The Start Screen Saver hot corner shows the screen saver immediately, overriding the setting for how long the Mac must sit idle before the screen saver turns on (in System Preferences > Desktop & Screen Saver > Screen Saver). It’s helpful if you’re working on something sensitive that you don’t want anyone to see, but you need to leave your desk to chat with a co-worker or use the bathroom. Depending on your setting for “Require password after sleep or screen saver begins” in System Preferences > Security & Privacy > General, you may have to enter your password to turn off the screen saver.

Disable Screen Saver

If you usually have your screen saver set to turn on automatically after just a minute or two, it may come on when you would prefer it didn’t. This could happen, for example, while you are pondering a complex idea or thinking about what to write. To disable the screen saver temporarily, use a Disable Screen Saver hot corner.

Launchpad

If you like using iOS, giving Launchpad a hot corner might make opening apps on your Mac easier. Apple designed Launchpad to look and work like the Home screen on an iPad or iPhone—just click an app to launch it. To see more apps, scroll horizontally—with a trackpad, swipe with two fingers; with an Apple Magic Mouse, swipe with one finger on the mouse surface. Just like in iOS, you can drag the apps around to put them in the order that works best for you.

Put Display to Sleep

Those who are concerned about energy usage might like this option. Toss your pointer in the associated hot corner, and your screen goes to sleep immediately, consuming less power than a screen saver. It lets you override the “Turn display off after” slider in System Preferences > Energy Saver. As with the screen saver, you may have to enter your password to wake the display when you come back.

Lock Screen

The Lock Screen option has roughly the same effect as Start Screen Saver and Put Display to Sleep in that it instantly displays the Mac’s login screen, preventing anyone from seeing what’s on your Desktop and requiring your password again.

Add Modifier Keys

If you find yourself triggering a hot corner accidentally, try adding a modifier key so its action activates only when the pointer is in the corner and the key is pressed. To set this up, open the Hot Corners dialog, open the corner’s pop-up menu, and press a key (Shift, Control, Option, or Command). The key’s symbol appears in the menu. Keep the key down and choose the desired action.

The best way to set up your hot corners depends on how you use your Mac, of course. Our favorites are Start Screen Saver because it’s a quick override of the screen saver settings and Desktop because it removes screen clutter that gets in the way of using the Desktop.

(Featured image by Norbert Levajsics on Unsplash)