- 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
Spotlight Menu: It’s Fast, Easy, and Always There
The Spotlight menu is used for quick searches when you pretty much know what you’re looking for and just want to find it without sifting through thousands of files. Let’s say I need a copy of a hotel bill from a recent trip to Portland to submit for reimbursement. I press Command-Spacebar and the Spotlight menu opens in the top-right corner of my screen. I begin to type in “Portland” to start searching. As soon as I type “P,” possible matches start appearing. As I continue typing, the list of hits gets smaller. By the time I’ve finished typing “Portland,” I am down to 39 hits—still too many. I know I stayed in a Marriott, so I add that to my query. Now I’m down to only four hits, including the one I need. It took me about five seconds to find the one file I need out of the 599,420 files currently on my drive. How amazing is that?