Tips & Tricks for Mac Users: Stacks

Is your desk becoming increasingly cluttered? You are not alone with this problem. All the better that there is this useful feature in Leopard: “Stacks”. A stack is an item in the Dock that gives you quick access to a group of files. When you click on a stack, the files within it are automatically fanned out or presented in a grid.

The display format used depends on either the number of objects in the Dock or the preset you have selected. To get started, Leopard provides two stacks: one for loaded objects and one for documents. The files you download with Safari, Mail and iChat are automatically placed in the “Downloads” stack. The Documents stack is a good place to store presentations, spreadsheets, text files, and more. You can create as many stacks as you want by dragging the desired folders to the right part of the Dock. This way you always keep an overview.