Apple’s Numbers and Pages apps provide a plethora of charting choices. But neither helps you with the crucial decision regarding what type of chart to use for which kind of data. Here’s a roundup of your choices, and some advice as to when each should be used.

The Preview app has long provided tools that let you mark up an image with arrows, text, and even free-form drawing. But other Mac apps—Mail, Notes, Photos, TextEdit, and more—also provide access to similar markup tools, and now macOS 10.14 Mojave makes them available even in the Finder and the new screenshot interface.

System Preferences is an essential tool that lets you customize your Mac in numerous ways. Learn how to customize System Preferences itself, the different ways you can open it, and how to navigate quickly to the pane you need.

It’s a cinch to rename a file or folder in the Finder. But renaming a group of them in a common way—appending a project name, fixing a repeated misspelling, or adding serial numbers? That, too, can be easy, with the Finder’s often-overlooked batch-renaming capability.

Buying something from the Mac App Store is so easy, it’s as if Apple planned it that way. But there are things you should know, and things you can do, to keep the experience effortless and handle any glitches that might appear.

The latest version of Safari offers some (but not enough) interface polishing and coordination with Mountain Lion features such as Notifications and the ubiquitous Share button, but it drops support for RSS feeds. When the most notable upgrade feature is a retooling of the address field, you suspect it doesn’t deserve its new version number.

What to do with your gently used obsolete electronics? There are various services out there that will buy them, but Sharon Zardetto discovered that Amazon has entered the field, offering top dollar, free shipping, and a no-hassle process.

As a new school year dawns, Sharon Zardetto contributes Keyboard Viewer 101 - how to turn on and use one of Apple's character discovery and entry tools. It's an excerpt from her "Take Control of Fonts in Snow Leopard," a 225-page ebook that's the definitive word about fonts in Mac OS X.

Apple broke Leopard's font auto-activation feature in Mac OS X 10.5.2, and 10.5.3 unfortunately doesn't fix the problem. So if you've been wondering what happened, read on for what font expert Sharon Zardetto has been able to confirm experimentally.

If you're still hanging on to Classic, and to fonts that exist only in Classic, this might be a good time to straighten out any old font suitcases that you want to bring forward into Leopard.

The Mac OS X approach to fonts is something that can leave users baffled, and no wonder: many different types are supported, they can be stored in a multitude of places, and Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger installs some duplicate fonts as a default..