- 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
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Sometimes Less Can Be More
If you didn’t read the previous tip, now would be a good time, or this one won’t make much sense. Done? Good. So now you know how to take an operator, pair it with a keyword, and do a search. But if you tried some searches using the examples I gave, you probably had too many results to be useful. Here’s how you can eliminate some of the junk by adding additional operators and keywords to your search. On my machine, “kind:mail” returns 2,374 results. (Yikes! And that doesn’t include the ones I have archived on the server.) But if I search for “kind:mail marriott” (don’t forget the space between the keywords—oh, and no quotes), I get 127 results. Adding one keyword eliminated 2,247 results I didn’t need! But the remaining results include emails I sent to and received from Viktor Garcia, the thick-skinned young lad who books the travel (and takes serious abuse over middle seats) for the Photoshop Seminar Tour. I read all of Viktor’s emails, but I’m looking for one particular email received from the Marriott in Calgary (it’s a satisfaction survey that I can complete and possibly score some free Rewards points). So I make a small change and type in “kind:mail from:marriott calgary” and am now down to one, that’s right, one result. It’s amazing what a couple of words and a colon can do. To recap, you can narrow a search by adding keywords—add as many as you need—just be sure to leave a space between them. You can also narrow searches by using a second “operator:keyword” query. If this seems a bit confusing, it’s because it is. But if you experiment, you’ll get the hang of it and you’ll love it. It is, in my experience, the absolute fastest search method.
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