I see far too many people keeping their most important files on their desktop. I know what they’re thinking: “I can get to it so easily from here!”

But that’s like owning a file cabinet, and keeping your most essential documents piled in a stack on top of it!

You can accidentally throw them in the trash…save over them…forget to back them up…. You have to look at the clutter all the time. Plus, it actually requires your computer to work a little harder because it has to keep drawing their icons!

The first step in cleaning up the clutter is to put the files away where they belong. Put your files in the Documents folder, and your photos in iPhoto or the Pictures folder. After you’ve straightened up your desktop, here are five ways of accessing your files just as easily:

1. Drag the file to the right side of the Dock. One-click access!
2. Open a Finder window and drag the file to the sidebar.
3. Open a Finder window and drag the file to the title bar at the top.
4. Search for the first few letters of the filename in Spotlight.
5. Use the Recent Items flyout under the Apple Menu.

Click here to see a video demonstrating all 5 methods!

Did you know that you can create mailing labels right in Address Book? No need for 3rd party label software!  Not only that, but Address Book will also print envelopes and contact lists as well.

First, create a Group for the addresses you want to mail. To do this, click the + at the bottom of the Group column and give it a name.  Then, drag the names into that Group.

Next, click on the Group, and choose File→Print (or Cmd-P).

In the middle of the screen is a Styles dropdown. Choose Mailing Labels.

Below that is a Layout button. Choose Avery Standard, and then the Label style from the next dropdown.

On the next button called Label, you can choose whether to print Home, Work, or Both addresses. You can also sort the labels alphabetically or by zipcode. There are even boxes to include the Company name, Country, or just Country if it’s outside the USA.

Further down, you can even select the Font, Color, and Size.

To print Envelopes, go back to the Styles dropdown and choose Envelopes. You can turn on and off your return address. Choose your envelope size and the orientation used by your printer’s manual feeder.

You can also print Address Lists to keep handy. Choose Lists from the Style dropdown. Choose your paper size, and then put checkmarks in front of the fields you want to include.

Here are a few printing suggestions as well:

1. Use your manual paper feeder for labels and envelopes instead of the main paper drawer.
2. Many printers have a door on back that you can open. Instead of the labels bending around the printer platen and possibly coming off, the sheet now has a straight path and will come out the back.
3. When printing labels, first print one copy of page 1 on regular paper. Place it over a blank sheet of labels and hold them both up to a light. Look to see if the addresses are centered on the label or if they overlap.  If necessary, go back to your printer settings and make adjustments so the text fits on one label.

Once you’ve selected all your options, click Print!

Color Picker

It gives you five ways of viewing and choosing your colors, as you can see in the icons across the top.

The circle is the easiest to use. Click around the circle to choose the color you want. Raise and lower the slider on the right to make it lighter or darker.

You can match any color you see on your screen. Click on the Magnifying Glass to the left of the top color bar, then hold your cursor over the desired color (you don’t need to hold the mouse button down or drag). Click, and the color bar will take on your chosen hue. If you don’t like the exact shade that appeared, click on the magnifying glass again to choose another one.

You can also store your favorite colors for future use. At the bottom center of the Color Picker window is a tiny dot. Click on it and drag down. A grid will appear with hundreds of color blocks. Drag the color bar at the top of the window down over a square, and let go. The color will now be stored to use again in this document, or any other time in any other program!

Now that summer’s here and you’re taking a zillion pictures while you’re on vacation, here are a couple tips you can use to keep your iPhoto zinging.

Item Counts

If you’re on a G4 or other pre-Intel Mac, you may find the Library achingly slow.  The culprit may be the little numbers in the ovals on each folder telling you how many pictures are inside.

But while handy, constantly counting your pictures slows down the program, to the point that you may think it’s crashed.

If you find this slowdown while modifying your photos, Go into iPhoto Preferences. Under the General button, the second checkmark says “Show item counts.” It may take a moment for the checkbox to update, so be patient.

Depending on your computer, this tip may either make you feel like you tripled your RAM…or do nothing at all. But it’s worth a try.

Empty iPhoto Trash

Because digital photos don’t cost a penny, you’re probably in the habit of taking a bunch of shots to make sure you’ve got the perfect one. And when you download them to iPhoto, you should be ruthless to keep just one or two.  You don’t need 4 copies of every group shot!

But even when you delete your pictures, they’re not really gone. iPhoto has it’s own Trash, separate from the Trash on your Dock.

I just clicked on the Trash icon in my iPhoto the other day, and was shocked…I had 1,347 photos in it! Amazing, since I only have 2,774 photos in my Library. While I’ve trimmed my photos down by 33%, I never actually got rid of them. They’re still taking up all that disk space.

First, I backed up my computer using Time Machine (if you don’t have Time Machine, use your favorite backup strategy).

Next, I looked through to make sure there weren’t any that I really needed (nope, just my duplicates and the bad shots). Then, I went up to the iPhoto menu and chose “Empty iPhoto Trash.”  It took a few minutes, and when I was done I had an extra 1.5 GB of space on my hard drive!

Do you use iWork instead of Microsoft Office? And do you need to open those Microsoft Word files other people send you? Not only can you open them, in just a few steps you can set up your computer so that Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files open up in your Pages, Numbers, and Keynote programs automatically from now on!

To set up Pages to open Word files invisibly, follow these steps:

1. Save the Word document to your computer.

2. Look at the icon in the Finder or on the Desktop.

3. Right click on the icon (if you’re on a laptop, hold down the Ctrl key and click).

4. Hold your cursor over “Open with…”

5. At the bottom of the flyout menu, choose “Other…”.

6. A dialogue box will open. First, click on the checkbox at the bottom left that says, “Always Open With.”

7. Click on your Applications folder and click on iWork, then Pages.

8. Click Open.

Not only will the Word document open in Pages, but from now on, all you have to do is double-click on ANY Word file and Pages will open.

You can do the same thing with Excel/Numbers, PowerPoint/Keynote, Adobe/Preview, or any other application you want to substitute!

To save a Pages document back into Word, in the Save dialogue box, put a check in front of Save copy as: Word document. A second copy will be created with the extension “.doc” instead of “.pages.” You can send it to PC and MS Office users!

Last week one of my dear friends had her hard drive crash. She lost everything – emails, photos, business documents, financial records…. And I’m sure you know someone who tells the same story. Hopefully, not you!

Do you back up your important files regularly? And if you do, can you restore those files if something goes wrong?

There are two major types of backups: archives, and emergency restoration.

Archiving refers to saving your essential files so that you have them forever. If you want to keep data for the long term, you need to make copies. The very best method is to burn a DVD. You can also store the files on a hard drive.

One benefit of archiving is that you can also remove the files from your computer to make extra space. For items like movies, one file can be 5GB, eating up your hard drive!

However, no one really knows how long DVDs will last. Some estimates are 20 years or more, but some say that a CD is only good for 10 years or so.

More importantly, the question is whether or not you still have the software to open old files! Technology has approximately a 5-year life span. While I still have my college thesis papers written on Word and saved to disk, 20 years have gone by. Microsoft Word can no longer open those files!

Another customer had her entire family history in a very old Windows computer, and I still haven’t heard if she’ll be able to open the data on her new genealogy program.

So here’s the thing. It’s CRUCIAL that every 5-10 years you open your files and resave them into the current versions of the software. Then, reburn the CD/DVD. That way, you not only have a fresh copy but an updated copy as well.

If you have important data saved, I also highly recommend exporting it to a text file (.txt or .csv) as a backup, and save it alongside the native copy. That way, you can import it into Excel or Word and reformat it for the new application you want to use it in. This same technique will also allow you, for example, to convert your Hotmail contacts list into Apple’s Address Book.

The second kind of backup is Emergency backup. What if your hard drive failed, your computer was stolen, or your house caught on fire?

Or worse, yet more common, you accidentally save over your work and lose something you needed? That “ooops” moment is the worst feeling in the world.

That’s where OSX 10.5 Leopard’s Time Machine feature comes in. All you need is an external hard drive bigger than the size of your computer. Plug it in and turn it on.

Every hour, Time Machine will back up all the changes you make to your computer, and it will save all those changes weekly until you fill up the hard drive! That way, if you delete a file, corrupt a file, or save over a file, all you have to do is click on the file in Time Machine, then click the Restore button. You’ll be treated to a stellar deep-space time warp visual as the file is instantly resaved to your computer. Breathtaking, and easy!

Time Machine is NOT good for permanent archiving, since it drops off the oldest backups after the drive is full. But it has saved my bacon many many times in the last year.

And if your old computer dies, all you have to do is plug it into your new computer and you’ll have your system back, just the way it was. That can’t be beat!

Time Machine is already installed (read: FREE!) on your Mac running 10.5. Hard drives run $99 and up depending on the size. Is your peace of mind worth less than that?

When you type an address in Mail, it helps you out by Autofilling recently used addresses. Start typing a name, and you can click the correct one on the list using your mouse (or use the arrow & tab keys on your keyboard).

But are you finding old, incorrect, and unknown addresses in the autofill? Here’s how to take names off the list:

1. In the Mail program, go to Window > Previous Recipients. A window will pop up showing every address you’ve ever sent a message to.
2. Click on any name you don’t want, and click on the Remove from List button.
3. If the email belongs to someone in your address book but isn’t associated with their name, click on the Add to Address Book button.