- You Cant Use It If You Cant Find It
- Spotlight Menu: Its Fast, Easy, and Always There
- Open Your Top Hit Fast
- Get Smarter with Just One Click
- Daniel Webster Would be Jealous
- Break the Top 20 Barrier
- Put Some Limits on Spotlight
- See What You Wanna See
- Change the Order of the Results
- Use Quick Look to Be Sure You Have the Right File
- Spotlight Window
- Refine Your Searches in Spotlight Window
- Add Items to the Search Criteria pop-up Menus
- Saving Spotlight Searches as Smart Folders
- Power Searching Is, Uhhhh, Powerful
- Sometimes Less Can Be More
- I Search, Therefore I Find
- A Little Help With More Complicated Searches
- Dont Know the Exact Filename? No Problem
- Sometimes Its Whats Inside That Counts
- Avoiding Junk Search Results
- Search Inside Your Photoshop Documents
- Spotlight Menu Versus Spotlight Window
- Searching the System Preferences
- Opening? Saving? Spotlight Will Help
Refine Your Searches in Spotlight Window
When you’re putting in your contacts in the morning and drop one, you don’t search the whole house to find it—you’re reasonably certain it’s in the immediate area. When you’re searching your Mac, most of the time you have some idea of what you’re looking for and where it is. You know it’s a photo, for instance, or a file that you created last December. If you refine a search using the information you already know, you’ll end up with a shorter list of results to look through. One of the ironies of searching is that, in many instances, the best search is the one that gives the fewest results. I’m searching because I want to be able to go right to the file I need, not so I can have the fun of sifting through 1,218 results to locate it. Here’s how you start narrowing your searches: Open a Spotlight window (press Command-Option-Spacebar) and click the plus sign (+) button at the far-right end of the search bar, right next to the Save button. A second bar will open with some buttons you can use to add various types of filters. Each time you click the plus sign button and define another search filter, you’ll see the list of results get smaller until (hopefully) you’ll see the file you’re looking for.