In this video, we’re going to look at how it can have our Mac automatically close out of any windows when we quit the app. Now, this sounds kind of strange. When we quit out of an app, any windows for that app are going to be closed. I quit out of Pages; any documents I had open are going to be closed. Well, with the Mac, what we can do is have it open up those documents again when we reopen that app. So if I quit out of Pages and I open it back up, the documents that I did have open will reopen. Let’s see how we can set if we want our documents to close when we quit out of an app or not on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac.

Let’s go and open up a Pages document. I click on it, and then we go up to File in the menu bar, and I’m going to go and open up the collector. So this is a Pages document that I’ve been working on. Now by default, what’s going to happen when I quit out of Pages, it will also close this document. So then when I reopen Pages, it will not reopen this document. Let’s see what I mean.

I go up two Pages in the menu bar, and then we go over to Quit Pages. Now I want to open up that document again. I want to open up the collector. I need to do some more work on it. I need to go back over to Pages, and then I go back under File; I go to my Open Recent. And we have the collector. So that’s what I have to do each time I quit out of Pages.

Well, with the Mac, what we can do is we can have it reopen any documents that we had open when we quit our application. In other words, when I quit Pages here, what it’s going to do when I reopen it, Is open up the collector again, this document, because I have it open.

How do we do that? Well, this is in our System Preferences. Now I go up to the Apple menu here, and then we go over to our System Preferences. From here, we need to go to General, and you’re going to see an option here for Close Windows when Quitting an App. You can see that mine is selected. So this is why it is closing that window. When I quit out of the app, it’s also going to close that document. I reopen the app. That document is not going to reopen because it is closed because this is selected. If I deselect this, it will no longer close that document when I quit out of an app; I mean, it will quit out of the app. I won’t have that document open anymore, but then when I reopen that app, in my case Pages, it will also reopen any documents because it didn’t close them.

So now, let’s go and close our System Preferences. I have the collector open here. When I quit out of Pages, let’s go ahead and quit out of it. So I quit Pages; I’m no longer in Pages. I want to work on that document again. We’ll be in that it didn’t actually close that document when I quit out of that application. When I open up Pages here, it’s also going to open up the collector. So I quit out of it, open it back up, it brings me back over to the collector.

If I close this manually, let’s go ahead and click on the red dot to close it. Now I still have Pages open, so I closed that document. Now, when I quit out of it, I go up to Pages. I go to Quit. And when I reopen it, it will not open up that collector document because I closed it. Now what I need to do is go and create a new document, or I can go up to File, go to Open Recent, and then I’m able to open it up from here because I closed it.

Now this works across multiple apps. You can do this in Pages, Numbers, Keynote, and a number of other apps.

So that’s how we can have our Mac reopen any documents that we’ve been working on when we open an app after we’ve quit out of it. What you’ll need to do is go to your System Preferences, General, and then deselect Close Windows when Quitting an App. When that is deselected, after you quit an app and you reopen it, if you had a document open, it will also, the Mac will also reopen that document.

Now, this is not exclusive to macOS Big Sur. I’m showing you on macOS Big Sur, but this does work across different macOS’s. So if you have macOS Mojave or macOS Catalina, you’ll have the same feature. It’s located in System Preferences under General.

So that’s how we can set if an app closes out of a document, once we quit out of the app, or if it will reopen that document once we reopen that app.