You can use the Stacks feature on your Mac in two ways—on your desktop and in the Dock. Both will reduce visual clutter and make your documents more organized and readily accessible.
How to Use Stacks on Your Desktop
On your Mac, you can use Stacks to organize the documents on your desktop by grouping them together by common qualities. For example, you can choose to group your desktop’s files by kind, which will stack all the screenshots together, all the PDFs together, all the spreadsheets together, and so on.
Using Stacks on your desktop is incredibly simple. Just Control-click anywhere on your desktop and select the option Use Stacks from the menu. This will instantly group your documents by kind—or file type—and neatly organize them on the right side of your screen.
If you prefer keyboard shortcuts, you can achieve the same effect by pressing Control + Cmd + O.
In order to change the method of categorization, Control-click on your desktop again and hover over Group Stacks By to see sorting options, such as by date or by the documents’ tags.
To expand a stack to see its contents, just single click on the stack icon. And of course, just double-click on a file in the stack to open it.
If you want to view the contents of a stack without opening it, hover your cursor over the stack icon and swipe left or right with two fingers on your trackpad or one finger on your Magic Mouse.
You can also customize the look of the stacks on your desktop. From the View section on your desktop menu bar, select Show View Options. In the popup menu, you can change settings like the icon size and the spacing between stacks.
How to Use Stacks in Your Dock
The second way to use Stacks is with folders on your Mac’s Dock. A common use of this feature is to add the Mac’s Downloads folder to the Dock for easy access to recently downloaded files.
To do this, locate the Downloads in Finder. Then drag and drop the entire folder onto your Dock to the right of the divider line.
Your Downloads folder’s icon will be displayed as a stack of documents by default, but you can change the icon to the original folder by Control-clicking on the Downloads folder in the Dock and selecting Display as > Folder.
Now, to change how the folder’s contents are viewed once it is clicked, Control-click on the folder in your Dock and select an option like Grid or Fan under the heading View content as. The Fan view is most often used for stacks in the Dock, but the Grid view allows you to see more files once opened.
Of course, the Downloads folder is just one common example of implementing the Stacks feature in your Mac’s Dock. Naturally, you can add any other folders to your Dock in the same way for quick access to their contained files.
Organization With Stacks Is Quick and Convenient
The Stacks feature on your Mac is an incredibly helpful tool. It not only reduces clutter but it also conveniently categorizes your documents so you can quickly find them when you need to.
And what’s more, all it takes is two clicks of your mouse or trackpad and your computer’s files are neatly organized for convenient access. Few other digital organization tricks are as easy to set up as that!
Even so, despite Stacks being a quick and convenient way to organize your computer’s files, there are many other methods and practices you may want to consider using to keep your computer’s files organized and easily accessible.
