How many of you have used Spotlight (that little magnifying glass up in the right hand corner of your screen) to find files? You can use Spotlight to search for things like applications, documents, images, mail, or other files. If you are using Yosemite (and you all should be!) you have additional results from Wikipedia, news sites, Maps, movie listings, and more.
You can also use it to make simple conversions. Type in 45 pounds, for example, and you get the result: 20.41 kilograms, 720 ounces or 0.02 long tons. To open Spotlight, click on the magnifying glass icon or use the keyboard command of command-space. Spotlight will pop open right in front of you. To search for anything, just type words related to it like a file name, a person’s name, etc.
Spotlight also includes a dictionary, currency conversions, and other quick calculations like the unit conversions I mentioned. You can limit where Spotlight searches in the Spotlight System Preferences. There you can turn on or off results such as PDF documents, Bing Web Searches, Spreadsheets, etc. In the Privacy tab of this System Preference, you can also prevent Spotlight from searched in specific locations, i.e. folders or disks. One thing that I have found handy is that unless I want to search all my thousands of emails is to turn off mail in Spotlight so it doesn’t clutter up the results with every email that has your search term in it.
How do you use Spotlight? Drop me an email and I’ll include some of the suggestions in a future Kibbles!
