New to Mac - Expose, what is it used for?

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Exposé basically shows all the desktop windows at once allowing you to click on and bring it to the foreground.
If you enter expose in the finder help window, top left on your screen, you will get all the info you need.

You can also drag and drop files between apps via Exposé. Just start dragging, invoke Exposé with or without Spaces, and hover over the target app/window until it pops open. Now you can drop into that app.

There are lots of "getting started" videos under the "Mac" tab on the main apple site. I tried to find one with Exposé, but did not. I didn't look through all of them, though.

You can do similar things by hovering over a Dock Icon and tapping the spacebar. It will activate the app so you can then drop into one of the app's windows.

Dropping on an app icon will usually create a new document with whatever you dropped as content, if the app can process that content.

The Exposé trick works well if you are using spaces, also.

What is expose really used for?

Its for organizing your windows and switching between windows (and therby between apps) quickly and easily.

To get started with expose, you might want to try mapping "All Windows" to the bottom left corner of your screen, and "Desktop" to the bottom right. That way, whenever you slide you mouse into those corners, expose will activate for you. (Mapping to corners is easily done in system prefs>Expose)

Once you get the hang of that, then you can try your own mappings... not just to corners of your screen, but to buttons as well (although I would just leave the default function keys as they are).

Once you get the hang of expose, then try spaces too. Just experiment with it. Spaces lets you do things like put all your email and instant messaging windows on one screen, all your work stuff (word excell) on another, and your web browser on yet another.

And last but not least, don't forget to play with "Command+Tab" to switch apps and "Command+Space Bar" to start spot light. For example, if you type: "Comand+Spacebar dic + return key" your mac will automagically launch your dictionary. Command Space word, return will launch microsoft word. Just watch the box in the upper right corner of your screen while you do try this.