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Welcome to the TDMD Daily Tip Podcast. My name is Marcelo Lewin. The digital media dude. Today’s tip is for Mac OS X Leopard in how to use the new Quicklook functionality built into it?

Quicklook allows you, as the name implies, to quickly see the content of most documents without having to open up the native application to view it. This is really a huge time saver. So let’s get started quicklooking some documents.

Okay, so here we are in my desktop and I’m going to go open up a folder. I could put a folder together with some simple files. And as you can see I have a variety of files. They’re a word document from Microsoft, MP3, CR2 which is my raw file from Cannon camera and MOV, a key note file, a PDF file, another word document and a jpeg, so even the old fashion way to look at this files or documents would be to double click on them. You can see a very small preview there, but with new Quicklook. You can actually checkout all these files and their content without having to open up the actual application that created those files.

So there’s three ways of looking at this files. The first way is you see this little button. If you click on that, that will open up your Quicklook and you can you here’s a Quicklook slideshow. The other way is by selecting the file that you want to do a quicklook on and pressing the spacebar. And the other third way is to actually go to file, down to quicklook and then it’ll bring it up.

Now you can look at a single document at a time or multiple documents at a time. So for example I’m going to click on this word document. I’m going to click the spacebar because that’s my favorite way of looking at quicklook. And when I do that, I’m gong to go ahead and resize this that fits in my within my screen capture. You can see my Quicklook here and it opened up the actual document. I can actually scroll through all the pages in that word document by using the scrollbar here on the right and you can see that I’m just scrolling. And then you can go ahead and just click X at the top to close that up.

Now for example if I want to listen to an MP3. I can do that. Click the spacebar and automatically it turns into an MP3 player. The same thing with a movie, a Quicktime, I can click on the space. Now this is HD, so I’m going to resize it here and it turns into an actual player. So the Quicklook will actually morph into the type of application or type of document it needs to play through it.

Now one of the cool ways of viewing documents is also by selecting all the documents you want to view and then hit in the spacebar. What you will see is a Quicklook open up with your first document selected, but you will notice at the bottom in the navigation of Quicklook, an index sheet icon. When you click on that, it’s actually going to show you all of the files you have selected and then you can navigate through. So for example I can click on this file and I’ll up so I can look at it.

I can also go on to my next file. For example the MP3 file here. And look at that and then I can go ahead and start playing the actual MP3 which you won’t hear right now because I’m not capturing sound of the system. But I can go back to my index sheet, move on to the next one. I can watch this quicktime movie or I can click on next which will take me to the next file. Now this is a keynote presentation, I set it up pretty large. If I click on next again, it’s going to take me to a PDF version of the keynote presentation that I put together.

Now, what is interesting here and what I want to share with you is a shortcut or a way to zoom in and zoom out in PDS. And I’ve only found this to work with PDF documents, but if you hit command and the plus or the equal key, you can actually start zooming into the PDF or zooming out of the PDF by hitting command minus.

Now since we’re talking about shortcuts. There are some shortcuts that I would like to share with you. I already shared with you about the command plus or command minus to zoom in and out. There’s also the command right and left arrow keys. So command right will take me to the next document, command left will take me to the previous document. There is one extra one which is command down and I’m not going to use it right now, but basically command down arrow key will actually open up this document in the native application.

Now, one word of caution with opening them up with command down arrow is that if you have multiple files selected such us I this case. I have all of these files selected. If I would hit command down arrow now, it would open up every single file into all of their native application. So, you want to be careful, you want to make sure that you have only one document selected versus all of them.

One last thing I wanted to share with you regarding Quicklook is that you will see Quicklook in a variety of different applications. For example mail now has Quicklook right next to each attachment. You’ll be able to view your attachments quickly without having to open-up the native application.

Well that’s it for now. I hope you enjoyed this Podcast. I’d love to hear from you. If you have a moment, please email me at marcelo@thedigitalmediadude.com. So until the next Pocast, this is Marcelo Lewin. The digital media dude. Cheers.