DanielWalters6 said:
If you want to quickly minimise everything, then you can just press the APPLE
BUTTON & H
This will "hide" Microsoft Word.
This hiding hides everything from view, it doesn't even minimise it to the
dock, everything just goes from view.
Clicking on the Microsoft Word button on your dock will make it all appear
like magic again.
If this is not quite what you want - then try fiddling with the Expose to
change the ways in which you can view all windows in a flash etc.
Hope this helps, let me know if this is not what you wanted or needed.
May I add to that?
(for SteveD mostly, I'll assume you know all this Daniel)
The Macintosh way is to place the menu for the current application
across the top of the screen and then have as many windows as needed.
In Word's case, one per document. There is no way to make Word put all
its documents in a single window. It breaks the Apple's Human Interface
Guidelines, and while it might feel strange to a new 'convert' you
couldn't begin to imagine the uproar that would ensue if a piece of
software did otherwise.
The advantage is that the menu is always in the same place and you can
use 'muscle memory' to get where you want, and take advantage of being
able to slam the mouse pointer into the top edge of the screen with
less precision and greater speed.
There are a number of Mac-ish tricks that let you keep your work and
screen even better organised than you are used to over on the dark
side.
In this context. cmd-opt-h hides every window of every application but
the current one. Tidiness!
cmd-~ cycles round all the open non-minimised windows in the current
application. It is magic, especially when combined with cmd-shift-~
which does the same thing in the other direction. Most of the time,
when I'm working with many docs at once, I find myself flicking between
a pair of them. Those two keystroke combos do the job.
Finally, when you can't stand doing what you are being paid for, and
want to answer questions on usenet, cmd-tab is the magic spell for
cycling through applications. On a Mac there is hardly any penalty for
leaving applications running for weeks on end, so, as you might have
guessed, when I need a little light relief, I command-tab to Thoth (my
favourite usenet client), answer or ask a couple of questions here,
hand out a bit of cheek on uk.comp.sys.mac and then cmd-tab back to
what I should have been doing.
It's the Mac way SteveD. Relax and go with the flow. I'll leave you to
imagine how narked I get with every application having every menu and
all its documents in one window which is wandering all over the desktop
from day to day. It's what you get used to.
Some more recent Apple apps are breaking the guidelines and putting
buttons on the top of each window. It is barely ok when they are
associated with just that one window like which finder view to choose,
but it is easy to dislike.
We can discuss it forever, but you run the risk of sounding like the
monarchs of Blefescu.
;-)
As well as you me as well!