At work lately, I’ve been using the column view in Finder on my Mac OS X laptop. I’ve never used it very much before, and I quickly discovered a frustration. All of the folders and document names for this project are very long, and have similar names. As a result, I would see an entire column with items like ProjectAlph...rison.shtml - not very useful, when the indentifying bit is in the middle of the file name.
Now, I quickly discovered that I can resize the columns by hand using the little “grabber” at the bottom of the column, but I hate having to do it by hand for each column. I wished there was something like the “auto-width columns” from Excel. Lucky for me, there’s a simple, if non-intuitive answer, courtesy of OSX FAQ.
Adjust the width of each column by dragging the ‘Re-size Column’ widget. Option dragging re-sizes all columns together. Double-click the widget to re-size the column to an optimal size, and option-double-click to resize all columns together.
I'm a 30-year-old 
… Which is exactly the way it is in Excel where option=alt.
November 30th, 2005 at 4:38 pm