How to quickly go to an open file's location in the OS X Finder

When composing or editing documents, one common task may be to locate the document in the Finder so you can copy it to an e-mail, back it up, rename it, give it a label, or otherwise change it around. There are several ways to reveal the document in the Finder, but most are relatively cumbersome.

The most obvious may be to click the Finder icon in the Dock and then navigate to the location of the saved document, and make the desired changes. Though using keyboard shortcuts and other Finder navigation techniques can speed this up, you can easily do this by taking advantage of the way OS X windows hold file path information.

In most applications, for documents that are saved to the disk you will see a small document icon next to its name in the title bar. Right-clicking the title or this icon will show you a menu containing the full file path to the document. Selecting any of the items will open it in the Finder with the next item in line being shown as selected in the Finder.

Using this technique, all you need to do to locate an open file in the Finder is to right-click the title and select the next item down in the list, which is the enclosing folder for that item. Doing this will open the enclosing folder in the Finder and show the open document, allowing you to quickly rename it or give it a label.

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