“I’m going to get organized!” Have you said this lately? Well, Mac will help you. It takes just a few simple steps to save and place things where you want them on your computer. It might be handy to have several titles for that one same writing. Do Command + D for duplicate and put it both places.
Have you noticed that when you go to Finder (Smiley man face on the dock) that under the heading of File in that top menu bar you can choose New Finder Window. Click there to bring up an identical Finder Window. Now you can have both copies open and go from one item or one column to another without losing view of the one you’re going to rearrange.
I’ve been writing stories, short articles, and poems for a long time. And Mac has made it easier to compose, print, and save these writings. Now I had the bright idea to copy the writings to a thumb drive as a backup copy for our son Robert to keep at his house.
The price was right for a Kingston USB 2.0, so we bought both a 16 GB and a 32 GB. These are the plain, metal things that are narrow enough to fit into the slot on the side of the MacBook Pro, not those cutsey things at the office supply store that appeal to kids.
But how much space do we need? Go to the Finder and click to bring up what you’ve filed there. Click on the folder in question, but don’t open it. (Click on the screen shot to enlarge, then click to go back to this page.)

Now, go to Command + i and up comes an information box with space for Spotlight Comments — those will be key words or phrases that you choose to help you find this later.
Under General you see the size of all that’s inside the folder in question. Here it’s 202,586 bytes which is 209 KB on disk. You see when you created that folder of stuff and when it was last modified. At the bottom you see where to click to bring up the info on Sharing & Permissions that you’ve allowed for it.
Of course you remember how to convert bytes to useful measurement of some kind? Me, neither. I did find an interesting article on how to compare this to that, but where did I file it?
To unclutter the desk top I started a file called Today News. Unfortunately for me, it has odds and ends from the last week. Now, what did I name the article I’d saved? Relax. I open Today News and click on the second View where I can make it show the items in the order of Date Modified.
Here it is: http://www.convertunits.com/from/MB/to/GB It can convert other units, gives definitions, metric conversions and more. On the left side at the top are 6 light green boxes with impossible-to-read lettering. I expanded the page view to finally bring up the words Computer Data Storage, Metric System, Date Calculator, Salary Calculator, Molecular Weight, and Discussion Forum. You do remember you can enlarge the page view by doing Command and + (plus) a few times on the page. To shrink it back do Command and - (minus) until you like the looks of the page.

Seagate Surprises

It seemed like a logical choice for an external backup. Seagate Backup Plus with 1 T. memory was at CostCo for a good price. Bought it, and planned to get at it much sooner than I did. Little did I know that some Seagate Surprises were waiting for me.
Time Machine seems to be happy with the FreeAgent Drive with 500 GB doing its automatic backups. And those little Thumb Drives are so easy to use for copying documents and folders from my computer to the iMac. But, what about saving a lot of stuff for our boys, so they’d have access to it on their PCs?
The Seagate Backup Plus came with a tiny 8-page folder giving minimum instructions. How difficult could that be?
Now, the challenge was to convert a series of writings I’d started out in Word for Mac 2011, then I’d changed into Pages ’09 for my own convenience.
Doing Command + I (i) brought up a little column that showed kind, size, where it was, keywords. I could click on Open With and make changes. So, at that time I did Open With Pages and clicked Change All where it says, “Use this application to open all documents like this one.”
However, our sons still are each using a PC computer!
Now, with the new, skinny Seagate Plus here on my desk I could easily — I thought — save both the Word and the Pages versions of the articles, stories, and poems I’d written.
Several hours later after dragging folders to the little Seagate icon I realized I should try this out with someone with a PC. That would be a friendly neighbor gal. I watched. My folders did come up on her screen. Only problem was her PC did not want to let her eject the Seagate. She phoned a PC tech she knew who advised her to just turn off her computer and then unplug Seagate. Seemed like that was the solution.
But, here came the biggest surprise.

I clicked to see what it was, and saw info from a company named Paragon Software Group that now had set up territory on my computer.

There was NO mention in the Seagate tiny pictorial Quick Start Guide that I would want or need a program or connection with Paragon Software Group. Clicking on Manual brought up a 24-page illustrated manual.
Later, looking for something else on System Preferences it brought up an unexpected icon in the list under the category Other. Their website is www.paragon-software.com Email is sales@paragon-software.com

Not knowing what I had done or what needed doing, I emailed our PMUG officers for suggestions. John Carter was the only person who had time to make some comments. We may work further on this later. This IS a busy week.

Let’s take a quick look back at settings that allow others to use your computer camera, microphone, storage, cookies, etc. Look at Adobe’s page settings, starting at the column Flash Player Help on the right side of this page http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/help02.html and clicking to look at each category. Privacy, storage, security, notifications, website privacy, website storage, protected content playback, peer-assisted networking panel. Then go to Table of Contents to get other pertinent information, including how to update Adobe Flash Player.

So, it’s an on-going process . . . Doing . . . Learning . . . Doing . . . Learning. Just when you know it all they upgrade this program or that device! More Doing. . . Learning. . . Doing!
This was today's handout at the April 19 PMUG meeting at the Prescott Public Library, by Elaine Hardt.