Spotlight Tips and Tricks

Spotlight is the Macs all powerful built in search tool that can be used to quickly launch and locate files and applications. Once mastered Spotlight can save you time that would otherwise be spent navigating through Finder windows. You can however use spotlight for more than just searching, it has a raft of lesser known functions that make it a really indespensible tool.

Tip: You can easily access Spotlight through the menu bar magnifying glass icon or by holding the (cmd+space bar) keys.

Calculator

You can use the spotlight search bar as a pocket calculator.  Just start typing your sum (no need for the equals symbol) and your answer will be highlighted as the top result in the Spotlight menu. At this point you can also just copy (cmd+c) and paste (cmd+v) the result into any document you might be working on.

Spotlights calculation abilities don’t stop at multiplication (*), subtraction (-), addition (+) and division (/) either. It also works with square roots, just type sqrt(42), Spotlight will even give you the value of pi by (you guessed it) just typing pi.
 

Dictionary

Although possibly not as useful as it once was (now we have the triple tap dictionary look up – see Using OS X Lions New Gestures ) you can also search your Macs dictionary from within spotlight. Simply type the full word and select Look Up from the Spotlight menu.
 

Advanced Searches

In most cases Spotlight will find what you are looking for almost instantly, but when what you’re searching for proves elusive spotlight has a few tricks up its sleeve to help, below are some of the most helpful:
 
Find by kind
You can filter Spotlights search results by kind. For example if you were looking for an email  you could add (kind:email) to your search query. You can also filter by: Application, Contacts, folder, email, event, todo, image, movie, audio, pdf, preferences, bookmark, font, presentation. Remember you need to prefix these with (kind:) then what you want to filter.
 
Phrase match search
Spotlight handles multiple word searches just like a search engine, it looks for occurrences of both words in any order. When you are searching for a phrase that belongs together you can save time by adding quotes to your query. This will produce results that contain the phrase in only the order it was typed.

 
Limit by date
You can tell Spotlight to search within specific date range. By using: (date:yesterday) in your queries you can find files, events and apps that were created yesterday. You can also use the following keyword with the date functions: this year, this month, this week, yesterday, today.  If you are looking for events and appointments in iCal you can also use: tomorrow, next week, next month, next year.
 
Limit by metadata
There are over 125 pieces of metadata (data about data) that can be stored as parts of files on your Mac. Spotlight is able to refine its search results using this information. Here are a few useful ones to remember: author, width, height, pages and size. For a full list check out this useful list: Advanced Spotlight Menu Searches.

 
Boolean Searches
You can combine any of the codes above along with terms such as AND, OR or NOT to create powerful boolean searches. For example you can search for a file types in a specified date range by typing: (kind:pages AND date:yesterday)