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The Mac is designed to be as user-friendly as possible. There are sometimes half a dozen ways to accomplish the same task, such as launching a program. With experience, one finds that this redundancy helps one to customize the system greatly; in the beginning, however, it can also be daunting. It is best to begin simply, and later to expand on the basics through experimentation.

The first item to be considered is the mouse. Standard Apple mice only have one button; many newer mice lack any buttons, but one presses down on the front of the mouse as if there were a button, and it registers the pressure. This single button serves the same purpose as the left button on a PC mouse: it selects an object, and if pressure is maintained, the selected object can be moved. One can purchase more advanced mice that include right buttons and scroll wheels, but this is hardly necessary. Just about anything can be done on the Mac using only a basic mouse, including the typing of text. This latter exercise would be very tedious, however.

The next item is the keyboard. The basic buttons are self-explanatory, and most keyboards contain special-purpose buttons as well. For example, one will often find three buttons to govern sound volume (quieter, louder and mute) as well as an eject button just above the numeric pad. There are three buttons on either side of the space bar that serve important functions. These are known as the control, option and command keys.

The control key makes the mouse button serve the same purpose as a right button. When it is held down and the mouse button is pressed over a file, a menu appears next to it, offering the appropriate options. One can open the file, make a copy of the file, or throw the file into the trash. If it is a document (e.g. text, an image, etc.) rather than a program, one can select the program with which one wishes to open the document; this is perhaps the most valuable use of the control key. For example, if one wishes to edit a photograph taken by your digital camera for inclusion on one's Helium "About Me" page, one would not want simply to double-click on that picture. The Preview program that serves as the default image viewer has many strong suits, but it is no image editor. If one has a program that can perform image editing, from Graphic Converter to GIMP to Photoshop, one can select the program that one wishes to use with the "Open with" option in the control menu, saving a lot of time in starting up a program and then opening

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