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Leopard: Spotlight ExamplesBy Francine Schwieder |
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Menu bar Spotlight search: click on the Spotlight icon in the upper right, and type something. You get all sorts of results, and this has the handy dictionary definition, if what you typed is an actual word, plus folders, a variety of different sorts of files, some containing the word in the title and some where the word is in the contents of the file, and various sorts of browser related items. The second illustration shows what happens if you are still in the menu bar, but this time you want to exclude things where the content is searched for your word, and get only items where the search term is part of the name. |
 | If, using the second method, you then click the "Show All" entry at the top of the Spotlight results, and further refine the search by clicking on the name of the startup drive, thus excluding all other drives from the search (the default "This Mac" will search everywhere), you get a list of items on the startup drive that include your search term in their name. It is unnecessry to click the "File Name" option, as it is already in operation from the Search for field, which has appeared already filled out with what you had typed in the menu bar search. If you click the "Show All" option in the first example, where you had NOT restricted the search to name, the Show All Finder window will include items that have the search term in their contents; to restrict to file name, just click the "File Name" toolbar entry and you will get identical results to those above. |
 | The ungainly result if you have the Search item in your Finder window toolbar, and simply type the word you are interested in there. With the defaults of "This Mac" and "Contents" you will get many many items listed. If you then click on the place you were when you invoked the search, and then click on "File Name" your list will again be identical to the other restricted searches shown above. Note that the results here are in List view. You can change this to Icon view or Cover Flow by going to the View entry in the window's regular toolbar at the top, and select which you want. |
 | If you use the keyboard shortcut of Command-F, then click the name of the place you invoked the search from, plus the "File Name" option next to it, then click in the "Search for" field and type the word, you get the same results as in the illustration above, which shows the window you get when using Command-Shift-F. This brings up the search window with "Name contains:" as the default field, instead of Kind. It is unnecessary to change the toolbar default of "Contents" but you may want to change the location default. |