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Be more productive with Shortcuts

How Shortcuts on macOS makes your apps more efficient.

By letting you automate frequent or cumbersome tasks, Shortcuts has become a productivity favourite on iPhone and iPad. And with macOS Monterey, the feature has come to Mac.

Pre-fill a stock response in Mail, listen to your favourite playlist or switch on your smart light bulbs. You can also automate across multiple apps to, say, batch-edit photos, send text from your writing app to your page-layout app, or launch every app and document you need to start your workday – and even choose the window arrangement.

The Gallery is filled with helpful shortcuts that are ready to run.

Best of all, your shortcuts are accessible everywhere, including in the Finder’s Quick Actions menu, via Spotlight search or keyboard shortcut, and, of course, by asking Siri.

To get started, launch the Shortcuts app in macOS Monterey. Then read on to learn how the experience has been optimised for Mac – and discover apps that let you use this useful new feature.

Get started with the Gallery

When you first launch the app, you’ll see your existing iPhone and iPad shortcuts – every shortcut syncs across your devices, no matter where you created it. Then check out the Gallery, where you can discover ready-to-use examples such as Turn Text Into Audio (to make reading a hands-free experience) and Rename Files (to batch-rename multiple files by adding or replacing text). There are brand-new Mac-specific options too, such as Split Screen 2 Apps, which arranges your app windows for maximum multitasking.

Create and customise

Ready to create your own shortcut or tailor an existing one to your workflows? The editor has been redesigned from the ground up to feel right at home on Mac: drag actions within a shortcut to reorder them, or drag a new action from the list on the right. Quick tip: the Next Action Suggestions feature (under Categories > Suggestions) helps you find the next building block of your shortcut, based on the blocks you’ve already added.

The editor shows potential actions to add to a shortcut.

Integrate Automator and AppleScript

It’s easy to convert your existing Automator workflows: just drag one into the Shortcuts app! And the most popular Automator actions have been integrated into Shortcuts, including actions that run AppleScripts and shell scripts.

Share your shortcuts

Sharing a shortcut is as easy as sending a link using the standard share button. And when you receive a link shared by someone else, simply follow the prompts to add that shortcut to your Mac.

Check out these Mac favourites that work with Shortcuts:

Work with text

Be creative

Boost your productivity

Master your schedule

Stay in the know

Manage your life

Manage your Mac

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