The hidden tricks of Macbook Pro

Taking screenshots of any size

Simply press Shift, Command and 3 at the same time; the screenshot will then be stored on your desktop. For a portion of the screen, the shortcut is Shift-Command-4 with the same output directory. To only capture an individual window, you can press Shift-Command-4, hit the spacebar, then click the window you’re trying to capture.

Type exotic characters

Go to the Edit menu of most apps and you’ll see Special Characters at the bottom. This panel gives you access to a huge range of symbols you can drag into your documents. Not all apps or operating systems support them, but these are mostly part of the cross-platform Unicode standard. There are probably more than you see at first too , click the cog to reveal more.

Sign PDFs right in Mail

Drag a PDF into the email you’re sending, hover over it then at the top right you’ll see a little button appear; click it, and you get a range of Markup options, including one for signing documents. Best of all, you can either add your signature by holding a signed piece of paper up to the webcam on your Mac – and it does a great job of cutting it out of the background – or by drawing on your trackpad.

Making your own keyboard shortcut

Go to System Preferences > Keyboard > Application Shortcuts. Click the + button to add a new shortcut. You can choose which app you want to apply it to from the drop-down list, but you must know the exact name of the menu command to type into the next box, including the correct case and any special characters such as ellipses. Lastly, choose a unique key combination to invoke the command, then click Add.

Making a wifi hotspot

For it to work, all you have to do is head into Settings then Sharing then navigate to the “Share your connection from:” dropdown box. From there, you can choose the source of the network connection you’re looking to share. Then pick “To computers using Wi-Fi” within that respective menu.

Email huge files

With Mail since Yosemite, though (and in fact with the webmail version of Mail at icloud.com), you can email files up to 5GB in size. What in fact happens is that the attachment really gets uploaded to iCloud, and then a link is sent to your recipient where they have 30 days from which to download it.