If you use your Mac every day for work and your personal life, chances are you have a lot of files, photos, folders, documents, and other data all over your Mac. It can make finding one specific file a pain in the butt. Luckily, Spotlight lets you search your Mac for pretty much anything, making it easy to find whatever you need. Here's how to use Spotlight on Mac.
What Spotlight can help you find
Apr 02, 2019 Spotlight search is possibly one of the best features on macOS. Operating systems all have a search feature but Spotlight is system search done perfectly. That said, it can break. It doesn’t happen often but sometimes, indexing problems may cause Spotlight. Feb 27, 2018 Search with Spotlight Click in the upper-right corner of the menu bar, or press Command-Space bar. Enter what you want to find. You can search for something like “apple store” or “emails from emily”.
Spotlight helps you find pretty much anything on your Mac. It indexes the contents of your Mac's hard drive to make it easier to find documents, emails, apps, music, contacts, and other information. It can also help you find information on the web, perform equations, and now in High Sierra, it can even find your flight information.
How to access and use Spotlight in macOS
- Click on the Spotlight button in the menu bar, it looks like a magnifying glass. Or, use the Command + Space keyboard shortcut. The Spotlight search field will appear in the middle of your screen.
- Type in your search query. Spotlight will return results as you type.
If Spotlight isn't finding what you're looking for, you can adjust its search results to be optimized for what you need. You can also exclude specific locations of your hard disk to prevent Spotlight from searching information you'd prefer to keep private.
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How to customize Spotlight search results
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- Click on the Apple menu button on the top left of your screen.
- Click System Preferences.
- Click the Checkbox beside the category to change what Spotlight will show you. If it has a checkmark, then those results will be displayed; if it doesn't, then those results will not be displayed.
How to hide content from Spotlight search
If you have sensitive documents in a certain location that you never want to be searched, you can tell Spotlight to not look in those locations.
- Click on the Apple menu button on the top left of your screen.
- Click System Preferences.
- Click on Spotlight.
- Click on the Privacy tab.
- Click on the add button. It's the + sign at the bottom left of the window.
- Click the item you don't want Spotlight to search for.
- Click Choose.
Questions?
Need any more help with Spotlight? Let us know in the comments below.
Updated September 2019: Updated for macOS Catalina.
Mac Os X Spotlight For Windows 12
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Mac OS X Lion includes a fabulous technology called Spotlight that can help you find almost anything on any mounted disk in seconds. With the Mac OS X Lion Finder search box, Spotlight can search for files, search for folders, search for text inside documents, and search for files and folders by their metadata (creation date, modification date, kind, size, and so on).
Press Command+Option+F to move the cursor to the search box of the active window. Stepmania for mac sierra pro.
The following steps walk you through all the features:
- Type a single character in the Search box.The window starts displaying the results.If you want to change the criteria for one or more of these items, it’s the same as changing criteria for a Smart Folder: Click the item in the Sidebar and then click the Action-menu button and choose Show Search Criteria. When you’re done changing the search criteria, click the Save button to resave your folder.
- If the folder or volume you want to search isn’t This Mac or your Home folder, open the folder you want to search, and type your query in the Search box in that folder’s window.The default is to search files’ contents. To search for a file by its file name, choose Filename Contains from the drop-down menu.
- When you find the file or folder, you can open any item in the list by double-clicking it.
You can also start a search by choosing File→Find (shortcut: Command+F).
Keep these points in mind when you perform a search:
Mac Spotlight For Windows
- You have a choice of where to search.
- You can choose additional search criteria as well as other attributes, including modification date, creation date, keywords, label, file contents, and file size.
- To add another criterion, simply click the + button on the right side of the window.
- To save a search for reuse in the future, click the Save button on the right side of the window.
Try choosing different options from the window’s Arrange menu — Application, Date Last Opened, and so on — to see the search results presented in different ways.
Mac Os X Spotlight For Windows 8
So there you have it — fast searches made easy in the Finder. But there are many ways to access the power of Spotlight, and the Search box in the toolbar of Finder windows is merely one of them.