Everyone who uses a Mac has a user account. If you’re the only person using your Mac, then there will only be one account. But if you share your Mac with other users — your family or coworkers, for example — your Mac will contain multiple user accounts. At least one of these is an administrator account, and that account is allowed to change any settings on the Mac. Others can be standard user accounts, who can change settings that affect some of what they do on the computer. You can also have accounts that are managed with parental controls; these are designed so your kids can use your computer safely. Finally, there are sharing only accounts, which you can create to allow users to access some files on your Mac over a network.
In this article, I’m going to explain how to create user accounts, when and how to use each of these different types of accounts, and how to delete them when you don’t need them any longer.
Read the rest of the article on The Mac Security Blog.