Bring up the spots
Mac Tip #200/15-June-2005

Mac OS X 10.4 is called Tiger. It was released a couple of months ago and includes many new features. I’m pretty much at home with it now and can say that I’m extremely enthusiastic about it. I believe it’s a significant and worthwhile upgrade for most users.

One of its major new facilities is Spotlight which brings a new and effective way to search your computer for files. Spotlight will search not only file names but also the content of your files.

For example, suppose you have a photo in iPhoto and you’ve assigned a keyword “dog” to some of them and “flowers” to some of them. Some photos fall into both categories.

If I now do a Spotlight search and enter “dog flowers” into the search field I will find not only this Tip which contains both words, but also the photos which bear both keywords.

If you visit the System Preferences (under the blue Apple menu) and click on Spotlight you can choose both the types of files Spotlight should search and also the keyboard shortcut, which is set by default to Command Space.

Press Command Space and enter your search term in the Spotlight search box which appears. Results will instantly start to appear in a separate window. When you see the document you want just double click it to open it.