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With that said, for the average person just looking to quickly open pdf docs this can be a significant time saver as it reduces application launch time, and potentially allows for less software to be installed on the Mac. Of course, this tip will be of less use if you need the full functioned Adobe Acrobat version on your Mac and use that for it’s powerful PDF editing capabilities.
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The speedy Preview app will now be the default app to open the PDF document. If you want a quick PDF file to use for this tip, you can grab the Apple history book “The Macintosh Way” for free ( direct PDF link), or just launch any other PDF file sitting around on your Mac. This works in all versions of Mac OS X to change the default app to open PDF files.Ĭhoosing “Change All” will switch all like documents to open with that newly chosen application alongside the “Open With” option, so in this case it will restore the leaner and very capable Preview app as the default PDF viewer in OS X and prevent the lengthy launch of Acrobat anytime a PDF is opened.
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Here’s where this is located in the Get Info dialog window:
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Change the Default PDF Viewer in Mac OS X
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