Yet, if you do make yourself take a few minutes today, you can save much more time every single day from now on. You will unquestionably get through your work faster and you very easily may be able to save time for your colleagues too. The Mac is able to take over tasks that are tedious and you do every day with Automator. Macs can also take over tasks that you do so rarely that you always have to ask someone how to do it.
If you're ever stopping to think that you may have got some important step wrong, you need to do this. When you find yourself wishing there were a faster way to do something, you should look at this. Anything that speeds up your work on a Mac is called automation and usually when you hear that word, it's followed by a supremely powerful, delightfully clever and unfortunately a bit fiddly series of instructions. Except today. Call this a handy guide, call it a way to ease you into the power of automation, but today we're going to show you a slew of one-step jobs.
Each one does something really handy. Each one requires you to do precisely one thing. And each one is using Automator, a tool that comes on every Mac. Everything we're about to tell you works exactly the same way. You'll open Automator, you'll tell it the one thing you want it to do, and then you'll save that instruction. You'll save it to somewhere you'll always remember, somewhere you'll always be able to find.
Frankly, you're going to save it to your Desktop. For all of the following, you're going to be saving an application. It's a very small application but it's one that you will later be able to drag files onto. This is what you'll see when you open Automator, except that it will have defaulted to highlighting Workflow. Ignore that.
Click on Application instead, and then Choose. Whatever you chose, the next screen would look the same and it would act the same. All you've chosen here is what you will eventually save to your desktop.
If you click Choose and then have any doubt that you may have slipped and picked something other than Application, look at the top line of the next screen. That top line will say Untitled Application or Untitled Workflow , something like that.
If it says anything but the Application one, close it and choose File , New to start again. You're thinking that it's a pretty big Application button to click on, you're not likely to miss it. Yet look at the large, blank right hand side of the Automator window. Regardless of whether you've chosen Workflow or not, it will always say Drag actions or files here to build your workflow and that will throw you.
Despite having that large empty area, Automator has otherwise quite a busy window. In the top corner there are buttons marked Library and Media. Make sure that Library is selected and then forget these two. Similarly, right underneath these you have sections called Actions and Variables. For what we want, just check that it's Actions that is highlighted.
Then right below that word, there is a second Library heading. This is a word that has a disclosure triangle next to it and yours may or may not be open.
Whether it is or not, make sure that the line saying Library is highlighted. This Library is part of Automator's plan to make things easy. If you click to open that disclosure triangle, you'll see two dozen different sections underneath it. Each one contains ten, twenty or more different actions that Automator can do for you.
So in theory if you knew which section you wanted, you'd just go to that. Most of the time, though, you're either not sure yet what you're looking for or you are but Automator's put it in an unexpected section. So invariably, we ignore all of this and instead once we've made sure that Library , Actions and then the word Library are selected, we go to the search box that's on the right of the word Variables.
In each of the following examples, you will type a word into that search box and then Automator will show you every action that matches. In this case we've typed 'event' into the search box and Automator has shown us six things it can do. You may see more, depending on what other applications you have on your Mac, but you'll always get a short list. We'll tell you the key ones to pick in a moment, but in every case what you'll do when you've chosen an action, is you'll move it to the large blank area.
You can do that either by dragging the action over to it. However, you can also just double-click on it and Automator will move it for you.
That doesn't sound like a difference that makes much of a difference but today we're only looking at single steps. For a single step, you can drag or double-click as you like. If you get into Automator more, you'll end up making lists of actions and there the sequence of them will be vital so dragging one to precisely where you want it is best. Again, though, we're only doing Automator actions that require precisely one step so just dragging or double-clicking means you're practically finished.
Some of the following examples will have little details or options that you might want to adjust, but the next step is always to save the application.
Once you've done that, you end up with Automator applications wherever you saved them and you may never need to go back into this app ever again. You'll certainly not need to think about how they work, you'll just drag a document or a file on top of their icon and let them do what they do.
If you're a Photoshop user then you might already have made your own Droplet where you can automatically create small thumbnail versions of any image you drop on it. Photoshop's Droplets are like everything else in that app, though, in that alongside immense power there does come quite a bit of complexity. Not with Automator. When you open a new Application, click in the search box and look for 'thumbnail'. You'll get a couple of options including Create Thumbnail Images.
Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Tom Nelson.
Facebook Twitter. Updated on February 05, Tweet Share Email. Apple Macs iPad. To test workflow, select Run at the top-right corner. You can also double-click Get Specified Finder Items in place of dragging it. You can include both applications and URLs in the same workflow. Was this page helpful? Thanks for letting us know! Email Address Sign up There was an error. Please try again. You're in! Thanks for signing up. Follow these steps:.
Do you load the same set of pages every time you open your browser? You can do this automatically in your default browser by creating an application in Automator. We show you how to do this as one of the ways you can use Automator with your browser. The Apple homepage may automatically add itself to the Address list. If you don't want it, select it and click Remove. Do you often combine multiple PDFs into one file?
Normally, you'd need an app or online tool to do that. But you can create a service using Automator that allows you to easily combine multiple PDF files into one. Now you can select multiple PDF files, right-click on them, and select your new service from the Services menu to combine them. For doing more with that menu, take a look at our tutorial on adding useful options to the macOS services menu.
If you often copy text and paste it into a text file to save it, you can create an application using Automator that will make this a snap. To use it, select the text you want to save in a text file, then run your new Automator app. If you have a lot of text to read, you might want your Mac to read it to you.
You can create a service using Automator that converts selected text to an audio file. Now you can select text in any program, right-click on the selected text, and select your new service from the Services menu to convert the text to an audio file. The service automatically saves the audio as an AIFF file.
The icon on the file includes a Play button in the middle. Simply click the Play button to listen to the audio file.
Automator is free and built into your Mac system. Why not take advantage of it to automate time-consuming and tedious tasks? You can even create a desktop app from a website using Automator or use Automator to schedule email.
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