HOW TO DO ANYTHING ON YOUR MAC, iPHONE & iPAD
Benefit from more orderly organization for everything on your Mac
AS SOON AS you start building a collection of files on your computer, you run into the problem of organization. Sure, you can divide things into folders and endless subfolders, but shouldn’t there be a quicker, more visual way to find what you want?
As it turns out, there is. Tags, a built–in feature in macOS, lets you add small colored dots to your files in Finder. They give you an instantly recognizable way to organize items, add labels, and then locate them with just a click.
You can use tags to denote file progress: to do, completed, etc. Or you can label files as belonging to a project or assignment, such as work you did for different clients. They also give you a quick way to find files —if you just need to quickly see which files are outstanding, for example. Once you’ve tagged a file, you can simply click the tag in Finder’s sidebar and every file with that tag will be shown.
That all makes tags simple, flexible and a great boon to your productivity. Here’s how to get the most out of them.
HOW TO Add tags to your files
Open Finder and find a file to tag. Ctrl–click it and select a colored dot in the menu. When you hover over it, the tag’s name appears. Alternatively, click the Edit Tags button (to the left of the “…” button) in the Finder toolbar.
You can also add custom tags this way. Ctrl–click, and instead of clicking a dot, click Tags. Type in a tag name, then click a color to assign it to the tag (or click the clear circle to skip the color). Now click “Create new tag”.
When you open some apps (such as TextEdit), you can move your pointer to the right of the file’s name in the title bar, click the down arrow, then choose a tag. You can also add tags in the dialog box when saving a file.
HOW TO Find tagged items
The quickest way to find your tagged files is to use the tags list in Finder’s left–hand sidebar. To change which tags appear here, go to Finder > Settings > Tags and tick the checkboxes next to tags you want to show.
Open a folder containing tagged items, click the Gr
