It will ask you what type of document you’d like to create, and in this case we want to create a Service. You can find this in the Applications folder in Finder, or find it using Spotlight. I’ll walk you through the steps I took to make this work, and hopefully it will inspire you to explore Automator to make your own tweaks.įirst of all, you’ll obviously need to start up Automator. What finally sent me to Automator was trying to find a way to send a file as an attachment to email by way of Outlook rather than Apple’s Mail application.

It’s easy enough to Google around and see the myriad options that are out there, and poke around in the various possibilities within Automator and come to your own conclusions.

What the heck do they all do? How could I use them to make my life simpler and easier? I pondered going through and breaking down how it works in general, but that could easily be a book’s worth of content.

It’s easy to stare at its huge list of actions with a mix of excitement and dread. In a way, it’s so simple it’s complicated: There are an overwhelming number of different options for things you can automate or tweak. As it turns out, it’s not a game but a very useful way to automate repetitive tasks or tweak the OS without having to know how to program. I saw it every time I went in the Applications folder and assumed it was a puzzle game about a friendly robot or something.

How To How to Use Automator for System TweaksĪutomator has been around for quite a few versions of OS X, and yet most people are entirely unaware that it’s there.

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