Meet the New Preview Pane in OS X Yosemite

David Pogue
·Tech Critic
Updated

Welcome to another installment of Pogue’s Basics: quick videos that cover the essentials of using your gadgets.

For years, the Mac has offered you the ability to see what’s inside a desktop icon. You can click it once and then press the space bar to open the QuickLook preview. But that’s so one-at-a-time.

Or you can switch your Finder window into Column view, where a panel at the right side of the window shows the contents of whatever file is selected. But in this view, you can’t control how the files are sorted.

In OS X Yosemite, there’s a best-of-all-worlds new feature. Choose View → Show Preview to open a new right-side pane in any window view: List, Icon, whatever. It shows you what’s inside each file you click.

See more of Pogue’s Basics on Yahoo Tech!

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Adapted from Pogue’s Basics, Flatiron Books, coming Dec. 9, 2014. Preorder here.