Open an App’s Recent Documents through the Dock on the Mac

0:00
In this video, I’m going to show you how you can open up recent documents through the dock on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac. So my dock down below has all of my favorite applications, it also shows any of my open applications. If I want to open up a recent document, what we generally do is we open up the application, let’s go over to Numbers here, I open up the application. And then from here, what I can do is go to recents. And then I can view all of my recent documents, I can also do that by going up to File in the menu bar. And then we go over to open recent and again, I can see all of my recent documents, it shows up to 10 documents here.

0:44
If I go to my Pages, you’re going to see I have the same thing, click on it. Here are my recent. And again, if I go up to file, I can view all of my recents. So that is one way of doing it. And it’s probably the way that most of us open up a recent document. But there is another way, a faster way to do this, what you can do is long press on the icon in the dock here. And when I do that, you’re going to see all of the recent documents that have opened for that particular application. So in this case, here, here are my three recent documents for Pages. Let’s go over to Numbers, I go over to Numbers here. I long press on. And again, I can see my recent documents to open up any of them I just selected and it opens up that document.

1:38
To clear that list, what you can do is go up to File on the menu bar. And then when you go over to open recent, what you can do is clear the menu and then it’ll start over. So if you have a lot of documents in there that you no longer need in there, what you can do is just start over by clearing the menu. Now this doesn’t work on every application, what I found out is it needs to have a separate one for each document. When I go over to notes here, I can open up my recent notes. That’s because all the notes are together in one window. Same thing with reminders, I long press on it, I can’t open up my recent reminders because all of my lists are in a single window. But when you’re dealing with an application that has separate windows, in some cases, what you may be able to do is just long press on the application in the dock and then select which document you want to open which recent document you want to open. So that’s a an easy way to open up recent documents for different applications with the Mac, you just long press on that application and the DACA doesn’t work for all applications. But from what I’ve discovered is if it has a separate document window, there’s a good chance that you can just long press on that application in the dock and then select from your recent documents to open them up. So that’s an easy way to open up your recent documents on the Mac.