A customer pointed out that in my article last week I mentioned setting up a customer’s machine to use Preview instead of Adobe Acrobat reader to open their PDF files but I did not tell you how to do that. This same method will work for any file type. As an example, I prefer to use Numbers (instead of Excel) and Pages (instead of Word) so I have set my Mac to open Word docs with Pages and Excel spreadsheets with Numbers. To do this you need to learn the “get info” command. It is available in the Finder under the “File” menu or by the keyboard command of Command-I.
To set PDFs to open with Preview, select any PDF file in the Finder and use one of these methods to Get Info. A screen like this should show up:
You will see in the circled area a drop-down box that will let you choose which application to use to open this document. Here is where you set Preview or Pages or Numbers or whichever Application you want to open that file. You then have the choice right below to “Use this application to open all documents like this one”. Hit the “Change All” button and you are all set.