Good morning everyone, it's a new day... and today we're going to start with some advanced workflow tricks... in particular this video is all about file handling... seems boring but it's one of those shortcuts that... will over the course of your workday, save you loads of time... and I'm going to use them throughout the course, I'll introduce them all here...
so they're in nice little groups, that we know what we're doing... and I'll try and do them all the way through the course... so that, you, like me, become... a file handling Figma shortcut master... all right, let's get started. The first one's easy, just make sure, in Figma, you've got a couple of tabs open...
even if they're just untitled documents, that's fine... and hit 'Command' on a Mac, 'Ctrl' on a PC... and just hit '1', '2', '3', '4'... so 1 gets you back to home base and 2, 3, 4... just means you can toggle between two different apps, copying and pasting... if you're like me you end up with like all the tabs full.
It works mostly in a browser as well, so the same shortcut... I'm in Chrome, 'Command', or 'Ctrl' on a PC, '1', '2', '3'... except, 1 doesn't go back to home base... it'll go to whatever tab that is... and like Chrome, you can have multiple tabs... if I go out to 5 there, that is just a regular old website...
so it's not specifically for Figma, just all the tabs... it's 'Command' on a Mac, 'Ctrl' on a PC, '1', easy. All right, next file mastery is, you can actually pin these ones here... so this is the main one that I'm working with, Event App 1... so instead of being all through everything you can right click it, and say... actually, just 'Pin Tab', please...
becomes a nice small version, you can have all the other junk over here... knowing that that's your good one... you can also re-shuffle these. So say, untitled is the one you're actually working on... so you want to move it over here, just click and drag it... same in a browser, right click it, pin it, drag it around, easy.
Side note, I do it all the time in Chrome... I have some documents that I always reference all the time... so my, like junk drawer of to-do lists... all the different emails that I have to check... and my calendar, just always open, then gives me space to do my other stuff... like Figma, and searching the internet, all right, now the next one.
All right, next one is these little dots up here have all your recent files... they can be handy rather than going back to this, then being in the community... and needing to go to the right place, just go there, all your recent files... though, if you're like me this can also get unusable... because you've got loads of untitleds, Dan. To make it work, hover above anything you use all the time...
and see this little star here... you can add to favorites, can you see them appearing over here? So the things you're working on all the time... and the things you want to leave behind, and be junk... or get swallowed up by the flow... these ones here are going to be in my Favorites file...
remember, on the desktop version you've got the little Home one, which is what... how do you get to it quickly? That's right, 'Command 1', or 'Ctrl 1'... on the browser version, I can still go to Command 1... but it just goes to the first tab... and all of my files are kind of hidden in the F there...
see, same, all the favorites are ready to go. Next one is, if you are working on really big files... or you're working with a really old crappy laptop... there's this one here, 'View', there's one one called 'Resource Use'... and it'll tell you how many layers you have, it'll tell you... how much kind of like Gigabytes it's using...
basically, your 2 Gigabytes to use in this file in Figma... and if you get close to the end of that, you can kind of see... if things start running slugging, check it out, see if you're at nearly maximum. The other thing that can happen as well... is that things can be stressful on the application... and it'll show you in this last bar here...
look, if I paste a big document or paste a big file... can you see, it kind of went up there, I'll get rid of it... you see, it's doing stuff... sometimes that can get maxed out as well, depending on what you're doing... often it can be a plug-in that is just poorly... or just really system demanding...
you might find that, why is it all broken? Have that open, and you can see, all right, it's trying to do something... is it super helpful? Kinda is, kinda not... if it does start maxing out though what you can do is... like big images like this are just too big for Figma...
and if you have hundreds of them you can just, you can run out of resources... so you need to make them smaller... not just scale them down, they need to be smaller before they come in... and if that's not appropriate just have multiple documents for one file. If your app or website is getting massive in the design... you might have to actually have two separate files...
and kind of divide them up so it's not trying to process everything. The other thing that might happen is... you might be using somebody else's library... so let's go to our 'Assets', let's look at our 'Libraries'... if we've--- I'll turn on one of our libraries... and it will potentially...
our one's only really small, so it's not doing much... but you can have somebody else's library on, that has thousands... it might be a community one that somebody's made... this gigantic thing, that seemed really good... but that's what's slowing your machine down... it might be that you have to pick out the stuff you need...
or make your own kind of like version of the library just to tidy it up... it can be also just, if somebody's made components and variables... and they haven't made them very smartly... they're just like copies, and copies, and copies, and copies, and copies... and you're trying to use those either through a library... or just copy and pasting them in.
I'm going to show you in this course how to tidy those up and make them nice... but you might be working with somebody else's file, just keep an eye on this... you can get rid of it, click it once, double click it, actually... again, this one is in desktop and browser... and the same 2 Gigabyte limit is kind of in both of them... it's kind of a browser thing...
and essentially that's what this desktop version of Figma is... it's just that browser loading without all the Chrome bits. Another one, small one, look at this, you can resize this, did you know that? I didn't know that for a long time, it's really handy... especially when you get into really long naming... you can just go, huh, that's better...
and alternatively you can make it smaller, why is it handy? I thought it was handy when I discovered it... Alright, next tip, actually the last tip... quick actions, we've done this before... it is 'Command /', or 'Ctrl /', the leaning forward slash... and you can type in anything...
like there's so many shortcuts in this course, to learn, in Figma, you're like... "What was that thing, the resource use thing he was talking about?," look at that. "Res", and I can go, all right, let's turn that on... so they have actually made another shortcut for it... for like international keyboards, it's 'Shift P'... it's not Shift P, it's Command P...
and it'll come up again, you can type in "resource", there's that one again... and it works for any shortcut. So what I might do is switch to Command P... just so, myself, I get better at using command P... because Command /, I always, does anybody end up doing that? Command \, or Ctrl \ is, turn the UI on and off...
which is a good tip, there you go... but I do that all the time and then hit this one... because that's the one I actually want... let's use command P, or Ctrl P, two shortcuts to do the same thing. You will notice that happening more and more in Figma... because they went with just, like a USA QWERTY keyboard at the beginning...
and now they're trying to make shortcuts... that are a little bit more universal to different languages keyboards... so you'll find, like, why is there two?, because there's two... all right, that's my file handling wizardry... on to the next video.