Customizing The System Preference Window On A Mac

The System Preferences window is the control center of your Mac. This is where you go if you want to change or configure anything at a system level. One time or another, all of us Mac users have had a need to jump in there and tweak things around.

As useful as that window is, it is not really organized in the most efficient manner. One has to carefully scan through the options to find the one they were looking for and often it takes more time than it should. For instance, the Network option, which is one of the most common things users need to access, is tucked within a cluster of other lesser used options.

Then there are all those options that a regular user would perhaps never use like Parental Controls and Startup Disk. Wouldn’t it be much easier if you could de-clutter this window, leaving it only with the options that you actually use? This is exactly what we are going to learn to do today.

First, click on the View item in the menu bar and select ‘Customize’. Once you do that, blue colored checkboxes will appear on the System Preferences window next to each of the options.

Now simply uncheck the options you do not want to see in the System Preferences window. Once you have unchecked all such options, simply click the ‘Done’ button up top and those items will be removed. The System Preferences window should look a lot cleaner now but we won’t stop here.

By default, the items in the System Preferences window are organized by category but for navigation’s sake, it would be much better if they were listed alphabetically. To do that, go back to the View menu and select ‘Organize Alphabetically’. Looks even better now doesn’t it? Now you can easily access whatever you want from an easy alphabetical listing.

But what if you need to access the items you removed? Do you have to customize again and re-check that item? Well, you could do that, but there is no need to if you merely want to access that item for one-time use.

Simply go to the Search Bar and enter the name of the option you want to tweak and you shall be able to access it right away, even it does not appear listed in the System Preferences window. The whole process of customizing this window takes about a minute but it will greatly ease the job of tweaking options on your Mac and save you precious time in the long run.

~ Yogesh

 

Tags: Apple OSX, customize system preferences, mac, searching Mac system preferences, system preferences

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2017 at 11:09 AM and is filed under Computer Terms, Mac OS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. 92637

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