- 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
See What You Wanna See
While I might not need Spotlight to keep track of every file on my drive (see previous tip), I do want it to keep track of things like email messages and iCal events. But if I’m looking for a picture I took of my daughter Megan, for example, I don’t want to have to scroll through a list of hundreds of emails and iCal entries that are linked to her or contain her name just to find the picture. Conveniently, you can limit the file types Spotlight will display in search results. Select System Preferences from the Apple menu, click on the Spotlight icon, and then turn off the checkboxes for any items on the list of categories you don’t want to see when you perform a search. Since Spotlight has still indexed my Mail messages and iCal events, I can search them from within those applications. It just keeps things a little neater to not see them every time I do a search with Spotlight.