SHORTCUTS CORNER

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Shortcuts Essentials

Utility Shortcuts on the Mac

• John

This is a somewhat different sort of Shortcuts Essentials story. I’ve got a handy shortcut to share, but I want to cover a broader observation about Shortcuts on the Mac and the ways it can be incorporated into your day-to-day workflows. One of the fundamental differences between Shortcuts on the Mac and Shortcuts on the iPhone and iPad is that there are more ways to invoke shortcuts on the Mac. That alone is a plus for Mac users, but the impact of the difference runs deeper. The unique ways shortcuts can be run on a Mac also makes what I think of as “utility shortcuts” more effective and useful on the Mac too.

By utility shortcuts, I mean simple shortcuts that perform a single action and usually aren’t more than a few actions long. For example, you might have a shortcut that pulls the latest article from an RSS feed, one that converts temperatures from Fahrenheit to Celsius, or another that converts a sentence to title case. Those are simple shortcuts to set up on any platform, but the additional ways they can be run on a Mac make them far more useful, especially when you’re working inside another app.