Learn a few shortcuts for quickly opening specific Preference Panes from the Mac’s System Preferences.
Did you know you could select any one of the System Preference panes directly from the System Preferences icon when it is in the Dock? You don’t even have to have System Preferences open. You can also quickly select a preference pane while in System Preferences. See how to quickly select a Preference Pane from System Preferences in this video for the Mac.
Video Transcript (video also has closed captions):
In this video, we’re going to look at the different ways that we can navigate through our System Preferences, how we can quickly bounce around between one Preference Pane to another. Let’s see how we can navigate through our System Preferences on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac. Let’s first open up System Preferences. I go up to the Apple menu, and then we go over to System Preferences. From here, we can see all of our different Preference Panes. Each one of these is called a Preference Pane. I click on any one of them to open it up.
When I open one up, let’s go to General here, if I want to go back to all of my System Preferences, I click on these dots here, and it takes me back.
Now another way of accessing our System Preferences is by clicking and holding on these dots. When I click and hold on to this, I have a menu that pops up, and I can select from all of my different Preference Panes are going to be in alphabetical order.
So I want to go back to General; I click on general, it takes me back. Let’s say I wanted to go to Apple ID, where my iCloud settings are. Well, instead of clicking on this and then going to Apple ID, I can click and hold on this, and then I can select Apple ID, and I can go to iCloud here. I want to go back to General. I click and hold on this. And then we go back to General.
So that’s how we can easily navigate when we’re in our system preferences. But my favorite way is to add the System Preferences to your Dock. If it is not located in your Dock, let’s go ahead and quit out of this, and now what I’m going to do is I’m going to remove this from my Dock. I just drag it up, and you’re going to see Remove; I let go. It’s no longer in my Dock. Now, for my favorite trick to work, we need to add our System Preferences back into the Dock. How do we do that? We go to our Applications folders. System Preferences is located in your Applications folder. So I go up to go in the menu bar, and then we go over to Applications from here. What we need to do is go to our System Preferences. And now all I need to do is just drag this down to my Dock here. I place it where I want in the Dock. So I can just place this where I want here. Once I let go, it puts it into the Dock. It doesn’t open it; it just places it in the Dock.
So now, how do I use this to select a Preference Pane? Now all I need to do, let’s say I want it to open up the General preferences; all I need to do is just click and hold on this. We have all of our different preference panes. Now I can go to General. I let go. It opens up my System Preferences and goes to General. I quit. Let’s say I wanted to go to iCloud settings. I click and hold on System Preferences. I know it’s located in my Apple ID. So I go all the way up to the top. Here I go to Apple ID. Let go. It takes me to my Apple ID. And from here. I select iCloud.
So that’s how we can easily select Preference Panes in System Preferences. If we’re within the System Preferences, we just click on the dots, click and hold on the dots at the top, in the toolbar. When we click and hold on that, we’re going to have all of our different Preference Panes available to us. We just select the one we want to open. We can also do the same thing when the System Preferences is in our Dock. We just click and hold on the System Preferences icon in the Dock, and when we do that, we’re going to have a pop-up menu, and we’re going to be able to select from all of our different Preference Panes.
So that’s how we can easily select our Preference Panes for System Preferences on the Mac.