Читать книгу macOS Monterey For Dummies - Bob LeVitus - Страница 21

One of the best features of all Macs is the excellent built-in help, and macOS Monterey doesn’t cheat you on that legacy: This system has online help in abundance. When you have a question about how to do something, Help Center is the first place you should visit (after this book, of course).

Clicking the Help menu reveals the Search field at the top of the menu and the macOS Help item. Choosing macOS Help opens the window shown in Figure 1-5.

FIGURE 1-5: Mac Help is nothing if not helpful.

Although the keyboard shortcut for Help no longer appears on the Help menu, the same shortcut as always, Shift+⌘ +?, still opens Help.

You can browse Help by clicking a topic in the table of contents and then clicking a subtopic. If you don’t see the table of contents, click the Table of contents icon, labeled in Figure 1-5.

To search Mac Help, simply type a word or phrase in either Search field — the one in the Help menu itself or the one near the top of the Help window on the right side — and then press Return. In a few seconds, your Mac provides one or more articles to read, which (theoretically) are related to your question. As long as your Mac is connected to the internet, search results include articles from the Apple online support database.

Although you don’t have to be connected to the internet to use Mac Help, you do need an internet connection to get the most out of it. (Chapter 15 can help you set up an internet connection, if you don’t have one.) That’s because macOS installs only certain help articles on your hard drive. If you ask a question that those articles don’t answer, Mac Help connects to the Apple website and downloads the answer (assuming that you have an active internet connection). These answers appear when you click Show All near the bottom of some article lists. Click one of these entries, and Help Viewer retrieves the text over the internet. This is sometimes inconvenient but also quite smart, because Apple can update the Help system at any time without requiring any action from you.

Furthermore, after you ask a question and Mac Help has grabbed the answer from the Apple website, the answer remains on your hard drive forever. If you ask for it again — even at a later date — your computer won’t have to download it from the Apple website again.

If you see a See More Results on the Web link, you can click it to launch Safari and perform a web search for the phrase you typed.

macOS also has a cool feature I like to call automatic visual help cues. Here’s how they work:

1 In the Help menu’s Search field, type a word or phrase.

2 Select any item that has a menu icon to its left (such as the items with Trash in their names in Figure 1-6).The automatic visual cue — an arrow — appears, pointing at that command in the appropriate menu.

Finally, don’t forget that most apps have their own Help systems, so if you want general help with your Mac, you need to first click the Finder icon in the dock, click the desktop, or use the app-switching shortcut ⌘ +Tab to activate Finder. Only then can you choose Mac Help from Finder’s Help menu.

FIGURE 1-6: If you choose an item with a menu icon, an arrow points to that item in context.