Switching between applications on the Macintosh

Switching between applications on the Macintosh

You use different application programs to do different tasks: Word Processing programs to write, Graphics programs to create images, Database programs to manage and manipulate information, and so on.

We've gone over how to launch different programs (click here to look at this). Now we'll look at how to switch between different open programs.

Why switch?

Some may wonder why you need to know how to switch between programs.

Let's say you have text in an e-mail that you want to put into a word processing document. If you open both your e-mail and your word processing program at the same time, you can copy the text from one program to the other! (We'll look at this later.) The rest of this lesson will show you how to move between different programs.

Activities: Switching between programs

1) Open several programs. (Click here if you're not sure how to do this.)

2) Over at the far right of the menu bar is a menu called an Application Menu. If you call that menu down you'll see a list of all the open applications. You can use this menu to switch between open applications. It looks like this:

Note that the menu item with the check mark is the application in the foreground. Highlight one of the menu items and click on it and then it will become the application in the foreground.

That's all there is to it!

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