Chapter 5: Working with Applications and Documents

Overview

You found out just how useful the Finder is in the last two Chapters, but you can spend only so much time tinkering with your look and feel, browsing your drive, and organizing files and folders. Pretty soon, it’s time to get some real work done. When that time comes, you need to open some applications and work with some documents. Applications provide the tools. Documents are the result of doing the work.

In this Chapter, we look at the different types of applications you can use in Mac OS X and explore how you open applications to start using them. We also talk about opening documents with the Finder and with other applications that are open. We discuss how to manage having several applications open at the same time. Then we delve into some basic methods of editing documents — copy-and-paste, drag-and-drop. We cover the ways you can create new documents and save the documents you have created or changed. Finally, we describe how to quit using applications when you’re finished.

This Chapter covers general techniques that apply to almost all applications and documents. Other Chapters get specific about particular applications that are included with Mac OS X. You can find out where we cover each application by scanning the table of contents or checking out the index.