- 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
Put Some Limits on Spotlight
Spotlight is able to perform lightning-fast searches by creating and constantly updating an index of the files on your drive. It is annoyingly thorough (kind of like an IRS auditor. Just kidding. Really, you guys do a great job. Some of my favorite people, actually) and will index every file on your drive so it will know where it is if you ever ask for it. That’s not all bad, because you don’t really want a search engine that skips a lot of files. Since Spotlight is eager to please, if it has indexed a folder on your drive, it’s going to look in it when it’s searching. But if you’re looking for an article you wrote last year entitled “The Negative Effects of Using Vista on a Person’s Happiness and Sense of Well-Being,” is it really necessary for Spotlight to search your Photoshop Presets folder, rummage through the Curves folder, and find the “Color Negative” curves preset? Save some processor power by setting some areas of your drive “off limits” when Spotlight is doing its indexing and searching. Here’s how: Go to the Apple menu, choose System Preferences, and click on the Spotlight icon. Now click the Privacy tab and use the plus sign (+) button near the bottom to add folders or disks you want Spotlight to skip. You can also drag-and-drop folders and volumes into the window, if you prefer.