Now, let’s look at the different ways to preview a document without opening up on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac. Now there are times when you may want to preview the document before you open it up, make sure you have the right document. Or you maybe wish to get a closer look at it, such as when you’re looking at images. Well, we have a few different ways to do that with the Mac. The first way is by just looking at the icon. If we look here, you’re going to see I can see a preview of my images here. Right now, I am in List View. What we can do when we’re in ListView, if you remember, is we can make these icons larger.
To do that, what we do is we go up to View in the menu bar, and then we select Show View Options. We have a new window that opens up, and then we have icon size. To make the icons larger, we click on the larger icon, and now we can see our image a little bit better. We can also- I’m going to make this small again- we can also always view them in our icon view. We go over to our icon view, and now we can see them in icon view, but another way is to show the preview option in our Finder window. To do that, I’m going to go back over to ListView. To do that, what we do is we go over to View in the menu bar, and then we select Show preview.
When I do this, we’re going to get another section in our Finder window. Let’s go ahead and select this, and if we look over on the right, we have this blank area here. Now, why is it blank? Well, that’s because I don’t have anything selected. Now let’s go and select an image. Click on this image here, click on it once to select it, and now we can see a nice preview of that. If I select my document here, the collector document, I can see what it will look like. If I double click on this, it’s going to open up in Pages, and this is what the document looks like. When we’re looking at a document with multiple pages, let’s take a look at this travel brochure. This has multiple pages.
What we can do is we can click on these arrows here to the left and right to go through the pages. Let’s take a look at the second page here. This can come in handy if you have different versions, and you want to go to the right version. Maybe a version changes on the second page. Now you can quickly look at that second page. To go back to the first page, you click on the arrow again. Then one of my favorite ways, I’m going to go and hide this preview here. Let’s go back under View, and then we’re going to go to Hide preview. One of my favorite ways is to use Quick Look. With Quick Look, all we have to do is press the spacebar, and then we get a quick look at our document.
Now let’s go over to this image. I select it, and now I hit the spacebar, and I get a quick look. Hit the spacebar again, it disappears. Let’s take a look at my travel brochure. Click on it, hit the spacebar, and now I can see my document. If I wanted to open this up in Pages, I would click on Open with Pages. Hit the spacebar again, it closes. Let’s take a look at a movie. Select it, hit the spacebar, and we get a preview to that movie. Hit the spacebar again; it gets small. We can do this with files on the desktop as well. I have this lighthouse document; I want to preview it.
When it’s on the desktop, I can quickly scroll through these pages by clicking on the arrows, or if I click on it one time and then hit the spacebar, I get a preview. This also works with other apps. If I go over to this Microsoft Word document, select it. I want to see what this Word document is going to look like if I open it. I’m not sure if it’s the right document. I click on the spacebar, and I get a preview. Click on again, and it closes.
Those are the different ways we can preview a document on the Mac.
