You'll find Mac OS X's Services menu in every single Mac application, under application name: Services. But if you're like most users, you probably haven't given it a second glance. That's a shame, because services let you access the powers of other applications while staying right where you are - in other words, they're big time-savers.
For example, from this menu you can quickly create a Font Book collection of the fonts that appear in a selection of text in a TextEdit document. But that's not all-with one menu selection,
you can also send the text via Mail, make a Stickies note containing the text, or run a Spotlight search on the text. Some services have keyboard shortcuts - Command-shift-L, for instance, will search Google using the selected text as the search term.
Savvy Application Required Even though you'll find the Services menu in every program, its items aren't active in all of them. Services work automatically in some applications, but not all. For instance, they'll work in all major Apple apps, since they're developed using something called the Cocoa programming environment.
Third-party developers, however, may not use Cocoa, and must explicitly add support for services. So you'll find that services work in BBEdit but not in Microsoft Word or Excel. The only way to know for certain is to try them.
What if you know the program you're in supports services, but all the menu items still appear grayed out? Remember that you must first select something - a file, a folder, or a chunk of text-to use a service.
An Ever Expanding Menu Your brand-new OS X machine may have only 15 or so services on offer, but expect this number to increase
in time as applications add services.
My Mac lists 73 top-level entries for example.
Many programs add useful systemwide services. Stairways Software's Interarchy, for instance, adds an Upload File option that makes quick work of sending files to a Web server.
So, the Services menu can become so large that it's difficult to use. Apple doesn't provide an easy way to remove unneeded Services items, but you can do it yourself.
