Murphy Mac

This time of year you might be managing some big lists: Christmas bonuses for all your employees, shopping list, Christmas card list, who’s been naughty and who’s been nice…

If you’re like a lot of people you manage these lists in Excel. This Snippet shows a great feature for digging through your mountains of data. Autofilter can find the needle in your haystack.

There are other powerful tools for Excel lists, Murphy will get to those in 2007.

Yes, it’s true. Murphy answers reader requests. Details. This one is for donrodrigo in Italy.

But the news isn’t all good. While Smart Folders can be quite useful, they might not be exactly what you’re looking for. One shortcoming: You can’t do certain kinds of advanced searches using a simple “or” criteria. iPhoto and iTunes and Mail users might be used to capabilities they might not find in Smart Folders.

Murphy uses Smart Folders to find the biggest files on his disk. Things he should delete or archive. Click Watch Now to see the Snippet. Murphy is searching for movie files on his disk and running into some issues.

You have a particularly creative use for Smart Folders? Post it in the comments!

A couple keys on the keyboard can get you precisely what you want when you’re flying through the Finder.

This Snippet also shows you how to add a printer to your Sidebar.

More on the Sidebar in a previous post.

As far as Murphy is concerned, stacks are mandatory from here on out. It’s about the most logical way to arrange photos on a computer display.

Aperture was first. Lightroom needs them. And now Photoshop CS3 has them. Take a look at this quick demo to see stacking in action.

On a Mac you can drag the mouse to a corner and have all your windows disappear from view. Did you know you can do the same thing in Windows XP?

It’s a little different. You need to have at least one icon in tow. And you have to drag to the Taskbar. Dragging to the Taskbar again won’t bring the windows back, like the Exposé function in OS X does. You can click each window on the Taskbar to bring it back.

Did you already know this? Tell us in the comments.