Mac OS X 10.4 Help
Using Spotlight to search for items
Spotlight lets you quickly search your entire computer for your documents, photos, email messages, address book contacts, iCal events, and much more. You can also use Spotlight to find applications and System Preferences panes. It's always available in the menu bar, no matter what application you are currently using. If you have a Mighty Mouse, you can assign a mouse button to open Spotlight. (Use the Mouse pane of Keyboard & Mouse preferences to configure your mouse.)
Spotlight is especially useful for finding disparate items that share a connection. For example, if you search for people's names, Spotlight can return their contact information, any documents that mention them by name, any email messages to or from them, any calendar appointments with them, and any iChat instant message transcripts you've saved that involve them.
To search for items:
- Click the Spotlight icon on the right side of the menu bar.
- Type what you want to search for. The Spotlight menu immediately starts to display a list of results, up to the top 20 hits.
- To open any item, select it.
- To view all the results, select Show All to display a Spotlight window. Use the commands in the sidebar on the right side of the window to sort and group the items.
In addition to searching on a file's name or contents, you can search on the wide variety of information stored about your files. For example, enter the name of a camera model to find all the photos on your computer that were taken by that model. Or enter the name of a musician to find all audio files by that artist. To see the specialized information stored for a type of file, select one of those files, choose File > Get Info, and look at the attributes in the More Info section
To organize your files so you can find them more easily, use the Spotlight Comments field in the Get Info dialog. For example, you could mark all the files for the same project with the project name, tag all your urgent files with the word "urgent," or enter a description that will help you find the file later.
If you want to limit your search to specific locations and attributes, open Finder and choose File > Find.