The time comes in every Mac user’s life when he or she hits the metaphorical wall: That rainbow-colored beach ball shows up way too often, and your Mac is bogged down by too many files, big caches, too many cookies, and who knows what else that builds up with everyday use. Or you think you’ve done everything you can to be more, ahem, productive, and your Mac still isn’t fast enough. Well, you don’t have to live with that state of affairs. We’re skipping right past the obvious time-savers (keyboard shortcuts? Been there, done that) to show you some of the best ways to speed up your workflow - and herd some more of your time back to pasture where it belongs - whether you have absolutely no time to spare or you can make a 20-minute investment in your Mac’s smooth operation.

TIP CATEGORIES

Keep it Clean (KIC) - Remember how speedy your Mac used to be? You can restore some of that fresh-out-of-the-box performance with these clean-up tips.

Speed Demons - These applications and utilities will help make your Mac - and you - more efficient.

Working with Word (Word) - Little changes can make your life with Word much easier.

Safari - These hints will help you surf Safari with speed.

Firefox - Open-source Firefox has a lot of tricks up its sleeve.

TIPS THAT TAKE NO TIME

1. Super-Quick Search (Safari, Firefox) - Oh, please don’t go typing “www.google.com” when you want to search for a phrase you saw on another website. Instead, if you’re in Safari or Firefox, select the text and Control-click or right-click. A pop-up menu showing Google Search will appear. Try it… Yeah, we thought you’d like that one.

Instant Google Search is at your fingertips with a Control-click or right-click.

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2. Email Web Snippets Instantly (Safari, Firefox) - If you use Gmail and the Firefox browser, it’s easier than you think to email URLs to friends. Put GmailThis on your Bookmarks Toolbar. Then, when you want to email someone a link to your current webpage, click on GmailThis. A window will pop up with the link text already added; just fill in the address info and click Send. To email a chunk of text from the page, select the text before clicking GmailThis.

To do something similar in Safari, press Command-Shift-I and your default mail application will create a message complete with the webpage URL. You just fill in the address and send.

It couldn’t be easier to email a URL to a friend than clicking on GmailThis.

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3. Count Your Words Live (Word) - Getting your Word document’s word count by going to Word’s Tools menu and selecting Word Count—ugh, so time-consuming! Just check out the bottom of your doc’s window to see your selection’s word count. If you don’t see it, select Word > Preferences > View and check the Live Word Count box under the Window section Status Bar.

Just check the bottom of your document’s window to get its word count. No work needed.

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4. Fix Text-Selection Angst (Word) - Do you wrestle with Word when you want to make a tiny text change? Head to Preferences > Edit and deselect the check box next to “When selecting, automatically select entire word” and you can select even the teeniest bit of a word.

5. Stop Selecting Around the Bush (Word) - Sometimes you just want to select a block of text and hit Delete (ah, doesn’t that feel good?). Clicking and dragging to make the selection isn’t necessary, and it’s a big pain when using a laptop’s trackpad. You could triple-click on a paragraph, but that only selects one paragraph. So click once at the beginning of the text, then Shift-click at the very end of the block you want to select. This works in many applications - not just Word.

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