As I become more and more accustom to using Leopard there are new features that I realize have revolutionized the way I work, play and really do everything on my mac. I recently discussed Spaces in a previous post and that feature has definitely changed the way I work, however, today I’m going to discuss Quick Look. Simply, Quick Look lets you look before you launch. Meaning, now you can view contents of a file without evening opening it. Well, how do you view it without opening it you may ask. It’s really just by the click of one button!

Quick Look comes standard with Leopard and can easily be used to view files with out ever actually opening them. This is extremely beneficial when quickly viewing multipage documents such as PDF’s or PowerPoint presentations. Why waste time waiting for PowerPoint or Adobe Acrobat or even Preview to load. Quick Look will let you view practically any file type even videos with actually having to open the file via another application.

For example, I have a jpeg on my desktop that I downloaded from InterfaceLIFT (a great site that you all should check out if you’ve never heard of it). As you’ll see below, by simply highlighting the jpeg and hitting my spacebar I’ll view the file without opening it via the default application ( in this case for me would either be Preview or Photoshop). It lets me view the file extremely fast.

I’m not going to waste your time and preview different file types but it will open practically any file on your system including images, text files, PDF documents, movies, Keynote presentations, Mail attachments, and Microsoft Word, Powerpoint and Excel files.

Now, if you want to spice up your Quick Look capabilities there are some plugins available that allow you to use Quick Look with “.zip” files as well as folders. You can access those downloads here and here respectively. You’ll also find instructions as well which simply show you where to drag a couple files on your system.

So you may or may not find this helpful but if you download a lot of zipped files you’ll no what I’m talking about when I say this is awesome. For example, a co-worker sent me some pics of his home office in a zipped file. I was interested in seeing how many images were within his file (because I’m a dork) so I simply clicked the file and then hit the space bar (after installing the plugin above) and I see this:

Whereas had I chosen to use Quick Look with just a folder it would look something like this:

If you’re every looking for a specific file in a folder you may find this extremely useful. I definitely have. I exchange files all day with friends and co-workers, from music files, images, to presentations. I’m using my spacebar more than ever! The speed is where you’ll see the benefits. It’s instantaneous vs. waiting for your default apps to launch. Even if you’re rockin’ 4GB of RAM like I am on my Mac Pro you’ll still see performance benefits.

You can even use Quick Look with Time Machine. How? Well, you may be looking for a file from a previous back up utilizing Time Machine. Once you believe you may have found the file, just use Quick Look to verify the content of the desired file and there you’ll instantly know if that is the file you were in fact looking for.

There are numerous benefits simply in my workflow and performance due to this feature I had to touch on it. Leopard users, are you too in love with Quick Look? I’d love to hear your thoughts on your experiences thus far and how it may have changed the way you work and play on your mac!

If you enjoyed this post and would like to stay tuned in here at toonice4TV please, subscribe now!

If you're new here at toonice4TV, please subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for tuning in!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 4:21 am and is filed under Apple, How-To, Workflow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.