HOW TO...
Photos Movies Music Office System Re-use searches Simple searches Start typing in the search bar and the Finder immediately looks for any matching files on your Mac’s hard disk.
Search scope
Click Save (top-right) to create a smart folder. Add it to the sidebar for quick access.
Add criteria
Tell the Finder to look all over or just below the last folder, and at file names or contents too.
Click + to add detailed conditions that files must match to appear in the results below.
Search in detail with Spotlight Unlock the true potential of the Mac OS X system-wide search engine KEY INFO DIFFICULTY
Intermediate TIME NEEDED
15 minutes WHAT YOU’LL NEED
Leopard, Snow Leopard or Lion (some features work with Tiger, but it looks very different and is often slow)
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MacFormat.co.uk
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hen you need to find something on your Mac, there are several starting points. Which one is appropriate depends on how broadly you need to search. Applications that organise large amounts of related information, such as iCal and iTunes, have a search bar built in. But sometimes you won’t have a clue where something is stored, and that’s where Spotlight comes in handy. In fact, Spotlight is the basis for searching across your whole system. It works silently in the background to index changes made as you work. This is why you can near-instantly track things down later. Spotlight’s most basic form is the Spotlight menu, accessed by clicking the magnifying glass at the far right of the menu bar. Type something into its search bar and all sorts of item appear – files, applications,
September 2011
emails, songs and more – grouped by type. You can control which types are shown, and their order, by opening System Preferences > Spotlight > Search Results. The Spotlight menu usually works brilliantly, but it only has room for a limited number of results. When there are too many, and when it’s difficult to tell apart files with similar names, choose Show All Finder at the top of the menu. You’ll have to cope with the jarring shift to a Spotlight window, and pick out the items of interest from a potentially much longer list; but you’ll be able to
“Spotlight’s most basic form is its menu, accessed by clicking the magnifying glass right of the menu bar”
select them and hit the spacebar to preview their contents and decide which is the correct one. Lion saves you hassle by integrating Quick Look right into the Spotlight menu. When you open a Spotlight window, it continues to show files that match the criteria you typed into the Spotlight menu. You can add more criteria to inspect additional attributes in detail. When you’re totally unsure where a file is saved, this is the most powerful way to pinpoint what you’re after. Spotlight searches can be started from scratch as well, cutting out a couple of steps. Any search that you think will come in useful again can be saved as a smart folder, so that you don’t have to rebuild it from scratch. There are some hidden tricks as well, which give you even more power than you might have imagined. Alan Stonebridge