Over the last year, I’ve helped a lot of Windows users buy and set up their first Macs. It’s been interesting watching them cope with a new operating system, and seeing many become confused by specific differences between Windows and the Mac OS.
In fact, there are recurring items that seem to regularly flummox Mac newbies. Here are six of the most common ones.
• Keyboard shortcuts. Macs have four modifier keys, which are pressed in conjunction with other keys to perform specific tasks — Function (Fn), Control, Alt/Option and Command. On Windows keyboards, there are three primary keys — Alt, Control and the Windows key, which is relatively new.
Windows users who like keyboard shortcuts often get thrown by the presence of the Control key on a Mac keyboard, which is not the equivalent of Control on a Windows keyboard. Generally, the Mac’s Command key (which usually has the 
symbol on it) performs the same function as Windows Control key. So, while Ctrl-C is copy on Windows, the same task is performed by doing Cmd-C on the Mac. You can find a good list of Mac and Windows keyboard equivalents here.
• Morphing menu bar. In Windows, each program window has its own menu bar, with familiar menu items — File, Edit, View, Window, Help, etc. But in the Mac OS, there’s only one menu bar, and it appears atop the Desktop. The menu items change depending on the program that has focus.
For example, if you are working in your Web browser, commands related to that program appear in the menu bar. Switch to a word processor, and those menu items appear. If you click on the open Desktop, or open a folder, the menu items are for the Finder, which is the Mac OS’s file system navigator, similar to Windows Explorer.
There is one constant on the menu bar — the Apple key, which is the left-most menu item. It never changes, regardless of the program that’s in focus.
• Closing a window doesn’t close the program. When you open a program in the Mac, its window has a trio of buttons on the upper left corner that are similar to the minimize/maximize/close buttons in Windows. The red button closes the window, but it doesn’t close the program completely. To shut down a program, you’ll need to click on its name in the menu bar, then choose Quit. A Cmd-Q also works.
The yellow button minimizes the program to the Dock — similar to the Taskbar on Windows — but there is no maximize button, sadly. The green button changes the size of the current window between two preset dimensions, but it does not make the program run in full-screen. To do that, you’ll have to manually resize the window.
• Installing software. This is a biggie. Mac programs downloaded from the Net usually come with a file extension of .DMG. This stands for Disk Image, and it amounts to a virtual hard drive that contains the program. When you double-click on the DMG file, it creates a virtual drive, displayed as a removable drive icon on the Mac desktop. Open that icon, and you’ll see a folder with either the program itself or an installer inside.
What some Mac newbies do is double-click it, thinking it’s an installer. The program then launches and runs. But the next time they go to run the program, they can’t find it, because it hasn’t really been installed — it just ran from within that virtual drive.
What you should do, if the DMG contains simply the program executable, is just drag it into the Applications folder on your Mac. The way to tell if it’s just a program: It usually will just have the name, without an extension. If what’s in the DMG file is an installer, it will have an extension — sometimes .PKG for Package — or will be labeled as an installer. Then, you do double-click it to run it. By the way, uninstalling software is usually just a matter of dragging the executable to the Trash, unless the program came with an uninstaller, which is relatively rare in the Mac world.
• Mouse buttons. Although Apple wised up some time ago and started shipping its desktops with multi-button mice (and its portables still only have one physical mouse button), it still stubbornly sets the default in the mouse preferences as though there’s just one button. I’ve seen many switchers from Windows stumble along with just one mouse button, or using the inefficient Ctrl-Click to bring up a context menu, not realizing they can enable the right mouse button easily.
Go into System Preferences, then Keyboard & Mouse. On desktops (or if you’re using a mouse with a notebook), click the Mouse tab. You’ll see a graphical display that lets you choose a dropdown menu for the right mouse button. Choose Secondary Button to turn on right-mouse-button context menus.
On a notebook, click the Trackpad tab. Check the items labeled “Use two fingers to scroll,” as well as Clicking, Dragging and “Tap trackpad using two fingers for secondary click.” This last item will bring up a right-mouse-button menu when you tap the trackpad with two fingers. That’s one of my favorite features of the Mac OS, and it’s one I wish Microsoft would copy!
• Backspace/Forward delete. On a full-sized Mac keyboard, there are two delete keys, just as on a Windows keyboard. The first, which is located in the same place as the Backspace key on a Windows keyboard and is labeled Delete, does the same thing as the Backspace key — moves the cursor back, deleting as it goes.
The second key, also labeled Delete, moves the cursor forward as it deletes. But on a Mac notebook, there’s only one Delete key, and no clear indication as how to do a forward delete. Use Fn-Delete.
If you’ve recently started using a Mac, are there any other items not on this list that threw you initially?
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