3.1. The Spotlight Menu
See the little magnifying-glass icon in your menu bar? That's the mouse-driven way to
open the Spotlight search box.
The other way is to press -Space bar. If you can memorize only one keystroke on
your Mac, that's the one to learn. It works both at the desktop and in other programs.

Tip: You can designate one of your F-keys (top row of the keyboard) to open Spotlight, if
you prefer. Choose System Preferences, click Spotlight, and use the "Spotlight
menu keyboard shortcut" pop-up menu.

In any case, the Spotlight text box appears just below your menu bar (Figure 3-1
).
Begin typing to identify what you want to find and open. For example, if you're trying to
find a file called Pokémon Fantasy League.doc, typing just pok or leag would probably
suffice. (Spotlight doesn't find text in the middles of words, though; it searches from the
beginnings of words.)
A menu immediately appears below the search box, listing everything Spotlight can find
containing what you've typed so far. (This is a live, interactive search; that is, Spotlight
modifies the menu of search results as you type.) The menu lists every file, folder,
program, email message, address book entry, calendar appointment, picture, movie, PDF
document, music file, Web bookmark, Microsoft Office (Word, PowerPoint, Excel,
Entourage) document, System Preferences panel, To Do item, chat transcript, Web site in
your History list, and even font that contains what you typed, regardless of its name or
folder location.
Figure 3-1. Left: Press -Space, or click the magnifying-glass icon, to make the
search bar appear.
Right: As you type, Spotlight builds the list of every match it can find, neatly
organized by
type: programs, documents, folders, images, PDF documents, and so on.
type or paste 38*48.2-7+55, and marvel at the first result in the Spotlight menu:
1879.6. There's your answer—and you didn't even have to fire up the
Calculator.
(For shorter equations—only a few characters long—the first result in the
Spotlight menu shows the entire equation, like .15*234=35.1.)
And it's not just a four-function calculator, either. It works with square roots:
Type sqrt(25), and you'll get the answer 5. It also works with powers: Type
pow(6,6)—that is, 6 to the power of 6—and you'll get 46656.
You can even type pi to represent—you know, pi.
For a complete list of math functions in Spotlight, open Terminal (see Chapter
16), type man math, and press Enter.
Second, the Spotlight menu is now a full-blown English dictionary. Or, more
specifically, it's wired directly into Mac OS X's own dictionary, which sits in
your Applications folder.
So if you type, for example, schadenfreude in to the Spotlight box, you'll see, to
your amazement, the beginning of the actual definition right there in the menu.
Click it to open Dictionary and read the full-blown entry. (In this example, that
would be: "noun: pleasure derived by someone from another person's
misfortune.")
And what, exactly, is the Top Hit? Mac OS X chooses it based on its relevance
(the importance of your search term inside that item) and timeliness (when you
last opened it).

Tip: In Leopard more than ever, Spotlight makes a spectacular application
launcher. That's because, as you'll notice, Job #1 for Spotlight is to display the
names of matching programs in the results menu. Their names appear in the list
nearly instantly—long before Spotlight has built the rest of the menu of search

Among a million other things, Spotlight tracks the keywords and descriptions
you've applied to your pictures in iPhoto. As a result, you can find, open, or insert
any iPhoto photo at any time, no matter what program you're using, just by using
the Spotlight box at the top of every Open File dialog box (Section 5.8.5
)! This is
a great way to insert a photo into an outgoing email message, a presentation, or a
Web page you're designing. iPhoto doesn't even have to be running.
•
Spotlight is also a quick way to adjust one of your Mac's preference settings.
Instead of opening up the System Preferences program, type the first few letters
of, say, volume or network or clock into Spotlight. The Spotlight menu lists the
appropriate System Preferences panel, so you can jump directly to it.
•
If you point to an item in the Spotlight menu without clicking, a little tooltip
balloon appears. It tells you the item's actual name—which is useful if Spotlight
listed something because of text that appears inside the file, not its name—and its
folder path (that is, where it is on your hard drive).
•
The Spotlight menu lists 20 found items. In the following pages, you'll learn about
how to see the rest of the stuff. But for now, note that you can eliminate some of
the categories that show up here (like PDF Documents or Bookmarks), and even
rearrange them, to permit more of the other kinds of things to enjoy those 20 seats
of honor. Details on Section 3.3
.
UP TO SPEED
What Spotlight Knows
The beauty of Spotlight is that it doesn't just find files whose names match what
you've typed. That would be so 2004!
No, Spotlight actually looks inside the files. It can actually read and search the
contents of text files, RTF and PDF documents, and documents from iWork,