Mac screen shots - the easy way to use them

It's taken far too long for me to realise this. When you take a screen grab using one of the methods Apple describes (see this blog, below and this useful article , the image is saved to the clipboard.

I have been opening Preview and doing cmnd-n to see the screen shot in a new Preview window. Then it can be saved as an image in whatever format you please. But if you want to paste the screen shot straight into a word processing document or a presentation then you can simply do cmd-v or Paste from the top menu, and there will be your image.

Use your custom icon in the Dock

Maybe you've added a distinctive icon to a folder, but when dragged into the Dock all you see is the plain folder icon? Or sometimes, oddly, the icon for an item inside the folder? To see your nice new icon in the Dock, make an alias to the folder and add a custom icon to the alias. Then drag the alias into the dock, and there's your attractive special icon. Click on it and it takes you to the contents of the folder.