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Help, Guides, and News on making the Switch To Apple Macintosh Computers
Sidebar Guides
To the left pane of any Finder window sits an area called the Sidebar. The Sidebar provides shortcuts to common locations and it is divided into three sections in Mac OS X Leopard. Each section is identified by uppercase letters and its associated collapseable arrow.
Just like most OS X interface components, you're able to customize the Sidebar to your liking. This guide will demonstrate how you can add and remove items to and from the Sidebar. As described in the What is the Sidebar guide, the items in the Sidebar are just shortcuts that allow you to navigate or access items with a single click.
In an another guide, we explained how to add and remove items to the Sidebar. In this guide, we describe how you can arrange items in the Sidebar.
It's easy to adjust the width of the Sidebar, simply drag on the vertical line that separates the Sidebar and the FInder area on the right.
The Sidebar can be configured to be hidden from Finder windows. If you decide to remove the Sidebar from view, you'll be left with a very basic Finder mode. The process is very simple and is done with two simple clicks. By default the Sidebar is visible.
The Finder and Sidebar co-exist in Finder Windows. The Sidebar resides on the left side of any Finder Window.
You can configure the Sidebar via Finder preferences to show only the items that you want. For example, you don't have to stick with the default items under the 'Devices', 'Shared', 'Places', and 'Search For' headings.