You can open System Preferences in dozens of ways:
Jump directly to a System Preferences pane by pressing Option as you tap keys on the top row of your keyboard: Option-
for Mission Control preferences, Option-volume key (
, 
, or 
) for Sound prefs, Option-brightness keys (
or 
) or Option-keyboard-brightness key (
or 
) for the Displays prefs. At that point, you can click Show All (
) or press ⌘-L to see the full spread.If you know the name of the System Preferences pane you want, it’s often quicker to use Spotlight. To open the General System Preferences pane, for example, hit ⌘-space, type gen, and then press Return. See Chapter 3 for more on operating Spotlight from the keyboard.
If you put the System Preferences icon in your Dock (Chapter 2), you can open it and jump to a particular pane in one smooth move: Click-and-hold the System Preferences icon. You get a pop-up menu of every System Preferences pane.
Suppose, then, that by hook or by crook, you’ve figured out how to open System Preferences. At first, the rows of icons are grouped according to function, as shown in Figure 17-1, bottom. But you can also view them in tidy alphabetical order, as shown at top in Figure 17-1. That can spare you the ritual of hunting through various rows just to find a certain pane icon whose name you already know. (Quick, without looking: Which row is Date & Time in?) This chapter describes the various panes following this alphabetical arrangement.
Either way, when you click one of the icons, the corresponding controls appear. To access a different preference pane, you have a number of options:
Fast: When System Preferences first opens, the insertion point is blinking in the System Preferences search box. (If the insertion point is not blinking there, then press ⌘-F.) Type a few letters of volume, resolution, wallpaper, wireless, or whatever feature you want to adjust. In a literal illustration of Spotlight’s name, the System Preferences window darkens except for the icons where you’ll find relevant controls (Figure 17-2). Click the name or icon of the one that looks the most promising.
Figure 17-1. You can view System Preferences icons alphabetically (top), rather than in rows by function (bottom); just choose View→Organize Alphabetically. Non-Apple preference panes appear in a final row. Super-top-secret trick: If you choose Customize (from the View menu or, believe it or not, the Show All button), the icons here sprout checkboxes. You can turn off—and hide—the icons you never use. (You can still choose their names from the View menu.)
Faster: Click the Show All icon in the upper-left corner of the window (or press ⌘-L, a shortcut worth learning). Then click the icon of the new pane you want.
Fastest: Choose any pane’s name from the View menu—or from the System Preferences Dock icon pop-up menu described above.
Here, then, is your grand tour of all 28 of the built-in System Preferences panes. (You may have a couple more if you’ve installed any non-Apple panes.)