In the days of operating systems gone by, the Save dialog box appeared dead center on the screen, where it commandeered your entire operation. Moreover, because it seemed stuck to your screen rather than to a particular document, you couldn’t actually tell which document you were saving—a real problem when you quit out of a program that had three unsaved documents open.

In most Mac OS X programs, there’s no mystery regarding which document you’re saving, because a little Save dialog box called a sheet slides directly out of the document’s title bar.

Better still, this little Save box is a sticky note attached to the document. It stays there, neatly attached and waiting, even if you switch to another program, another document, the desktop, or wherever. When you finally return to the document, the Save sheet is still there, waiting for you to type a file name and save the document.

Of course you, O savvy reader, have probably never saved a document into some deeply nested folder by accident, never to see it again. But millions of novices (and even a few experts) have fallen into this trap.

When the Save sheet appears, a pop-up menu shows you precisely where Mac OS X proposes to put your newly created document: usually in the Documents folder of your own Home folder. For many people, this is an excellent suggestion. If you keep everything in your Documents folder, it will be extremely easy to find, and you’ll be able to back up your work just by dragging that single folder to a backup disk.

As shown at top in Figure 4-22, the Where pop-up menu gives you direct access to some other places you might want to save a newly created file. (The keystrokes for the most important folders work here, too—Shift--H for your Home folder, for example.)

Figure 4-22. Top: The Save dialog box, or sheet, often appears in its compact form. Right (inset): If you open the Where pop-up menu, you’ll find that Mac OS X lists all the places it thinks you might want to save your new document: on the hard drive, in a folder you’ve put into your Sidebar, or into a folder you’ve recently opened. Bottom: If you want to choose a different folder or create a new folder, click the ▾ button indicated by the cursor above to expand the dialog box. Here, you see the equivalent of the Finder—with a choice of icon, list, or column view. Even the Sidebar is here, complete with access to other disks on the network.

In any case, when you save a file, the options in the Where pop-up menu have you covered 90 percent of the time. Most people work with a limited set of folders for active documents.

But when you want to save a new document into a new folder, or when you want to navigate to a folder that isn’t listed in the Where pop-up menu, all is not lost. Click the ▾ button identified in Figure 4-22. The Save sheet expands into a very familiar sight: a miniature version of the Finder.

There’s your Sidebar, complete with access to the other computers on your network. There are the ◂/▸ buttons. There are your little buttons for icon, list, column, and (in most programs) even Cover Flow views.

Most of the familiar Finder navigation shortcuts work here, too. For example, press the ← and → keys to navigate the columns, or the ↑ and ↓ keys to highlight the disk and folder names within a column. Once you’ve highlighted a column, you can also type to select the first letters of disk or folder names.

In fact, you can use Quick Look (Quick Look) in the Open and Save dialog box, too. Highlight any file or folder in the list and tap the space bar to view it in a full-size window.

When you’re finished playing around, open the folder where you want to save your newly created document, and then click Save to store it there.

Alternatively, click New Folder (or press the usual New Folder keystroke, Shift--N) to create a new folder inside the folder you’re looking at. (If you’re in column view, then the new folder appears inside whichever folder is highlighted.)

You’ll be asked to type the new name for the folder. After you’ve done so, click Create (or press Return). The new folder appears and opens before you, empty. You can now proceed with saving your new document into it, if you like.

The next time you save a new document, the Save sheet reappears in whatever condition you left it. That is, if you used column view the last time, it’s still in column view. At any time, you can collapse it into simplified view, shown at top in Figure 4-22, by clicking the ▴ button to the right of the Where pop-up menu.

Whether you’re using the mini-sheet or the expanded view, you can save yourself some folder-burrowing time by following the tip shown in Figure 4-23. This feature is totally undocumented—but well worth learning.

The search box at the top of the Open and Save dialog box is a clone of the Finder’s search box (Chapter 3). Press -F to make your insertion point jump there. Type a few letters of the name of the file or folder you’re looking for, and up it pops, regardless of its actual hard-disk location.

Your savings: 5 minutes of burrowing through folders to find it, and several pages of reading about how to navigate the Save and Open boxes.

Figure 4-23. The quickest way to specify a folder location is to drag the icon of any folder or disk from your desktop directly into the Save or Open sheet. Mac OS X instantly displays the contents of that folder or disk.

The Save dialog box in many programs offers a pop-up menu of file formats below the Save As box. Use this menu when preparing a document for use by somebody else—somebody whose computer doesn’t have the same software. For example, if you’ve used a graphics program to prepare a photograph for use on the Web, this menu is where you specify JPEG format (the standard Web format for photos).

The dialog box that appears when you choose File→Open is almost identical to the expanded Save File sheet. Because you encounter it only when you’re opening an existing file, this dialog box lacks a Save button, file name field, and so on.

But the Open box adds a new Sidebar category called Media, which gives you direct access to all your photos, music, and movies. Apple figures you might want to import these items into a document you’re working on.

Most of the other Save File dialog box controls are equally useful here. That handy Spotlight search bar is still there, only a -F away. Once again, you can begin your navigation by seeing what’s on the desktop (press -D) or in your Home folder (Shift--H). Once again, you can find a folder or a disk by beginning your quest with the Sidebar, and then navigate using icon, list, or column view. And once again, you can drag a folder, disk, or file icon off your desktop directly into the dialog box to specify where you want to look. (If you drag a file icon, you’re shown the folder that contains it.)

When you’ve finally located the file you want to open, do so by double-clicking it or highlighting it (which you can do from the keyboard), and then pressing Return, Enter, or -O.

In general, most people don’t encounter the Open File dialog box nearly as often as the Save File dialog box. That’s because the Mac offers many more convenient ways to open a file—double-clicking its icon in the Finder, choosing its name from →Recent Items, and so on—but only a single way to save a new file.

Gem in the Rough: Using the Dock or Sidebar for Drag-and-Drop

The Mac is smart about the relationship between documents and applications. If you double-click a TextEdit document icon, for example, TextEdit opens automatically and shows you the document.

But it’s occasionally useful to open a document using a program other than the one that created it. Perhaps, as is often the case with downloaded Internet graphics, you don’t have the program that created it, or you don’t know which one was used. This technique is also useful if you want to open a Read Me file into your word processor, such as Word, instead of the usual TextEdit program.

In such cases, the Dock is handy: Just drag the mystery document onto one of the Dock’s tiles, as shown here. Doing so forces the program to open the document—if it can. (Dragging onto a program’s icon in the Sidebar or even the Finder toolbar works just as well.)

Incidentally, in general only the Dock icons of programs that can, in fact, open the file you’re dragging become highlighted. The others just shrug indifferently or even scoot aside, thinking you’re trying to drag the file into the Dock.

Pressing Option- as you drag forces Dock icons to be more tolerant. Now all of them “light up” as your document touches them, indicating that they’ll try to open your file. Even so, a “could not be opened” error message may result. As they say in Cupertino, sometimes what a can really needs is a can opener.