I have been asked this a number of times recently and thought it was worth putting in here.

There are two simple ways to quit a non-responsive application from the desktop.

1 Press the ‘Cmd-Alt-Esc’ keys to pop up the ‘force quit’ window. From here you can choose an application to force quit. Very unhappy applications are shown in red! For Windows users this is the closest to Ctrl-Alt-Delete.

2 Run the Activity Monitor application. This (apart from many other things) shows a list of all the application running on your Mac. Just click on a name in the list to highlight it, then click the big red ‘Quit Process’ button at the top of the window. Just be careful not to quit anything important!

If I was being glib I would also remind you that applications don’t often crash on a Mac (very helpful!) and you could read the manual. The second bit of advice is actually worth taking taking seriously. The built in Mac help is very good and I’ve learnt a fair amount from it. For general ‘how to use a Mac’ help make sure you are in the Finder (click on your desktop, or the finder icon in the iconbar, or open any file folder/diredctory) and from the menu at the top of the screen choose ‘help’ > ‘mac help’.

There’s a good ‘Switching from Windows’ section in there too.

A shortcut to help is to press the ‘Cmd-shift-?’ keys (cmd is the apple key). This will open up help for whichever application you are in.

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