We have two large LCD televisions in our flagship South Burlington store connected to Mac Minis and acting as big digital signs. Long-time Burlington employee David Boyd put together an excellent looping Keynote presentation, and it runs all day, every day. Unfortunately, one of these big displays failed yesterday—for the second time in as many months. This is frustrating. I generally handle these types of issues, but am leaving for vacation tomorrow, and had to offload the service arrangements to Katie.
Warranty claims through Viewsonic must include an original invoice, and I knew that somewhere in my mountain of email I had that invoice saved. Instead of looking through all the email from our Assitant Controller, Cindy (Cindy found it for me a few months back), I clicked on the Spotlight magnifying glass and typed Viewsonic kind:mail from:cindy. This brought up the one email from Cindy containing the word Viewsonic in the PDF attachment.
You can use plenty of other parameters in Spotlight. Say you want to see all the image files (JPG, PNG, TIFF, etc) created yesterday. You’d type kind:images created:3/2/09.
Say I want to see emails from my mom in which we discuss Small Dog. I’d search kind:mail from:mom.
Or, say I need documents written by Jon in January 2008 containing the phrase “crumb snatchers” (as he affectionately calls his children). That search would be “crumb snatchers” kind:document date:1/1/08-1/31/08.
People are amazed when I show them the hidden power of Spotlight. There’s no reason you can’t use it to its full potential. If you go to the Help menu on the top of your screen, search for Spotlight, and show all results. Not surprisingly, the Help system’s search engine is powered by Spotlight!