3.2. The Spotlight Window
As you may have noticed, the Spotlight menu doesn't list every match on your hard drive.
Unless you own one of those extremely rare 60-inch Apple Skyscraper Displays, there
just isn't room.
Instead, Spotlight uses some fancy behind-the-scenes analysis to calculate and display the
20 most likely matches for what you typed. But at the top of the menu, you usually see
that there are many other possible matches; it says something like "Show All," meaning
that there are other candidates. (Mac OS X no longer tells you how many other results
there are.)
There is, however, a second, more powerful way into the Spotlight labyrinth. And that's
to use the Spotlight window, shown in Figure 3-2
.
3.2.1. Spotlight Window from Spotlight Menu
If the Spotlight menu—its Most Likely to Succeed list—doesn't include what you're
looking for, click Show All (or just press Return or Enter). You've just opened the
Spotlight window.
Now you have access to the complete list of matches, neatly listed in what appears to be a
standard Finder window.
3.2.2. Opening the Spotlight Window Directly
You can also open the Spotlight window directly, without using the Spotlight menu as a
trigger.
Actually, there are three ways to get to the Spotlight window (Figure 3-2
):
•
-F (for Find, get it?). When you choose File Find (or press -F), you
get an empty Spotlight window, ready to fill in for your search.
•
Option- -Space bar. This keystroke opens the same window. But instead of
starting empty and filling up, this window starts with a list of every single thing on
your Mac and winnows down as you type a search query.


document whose name begins with the letters Cro, is over one megabyte in size, was
created after 10/1/07 but before the end of the year, was changed within the last week,
has the file name suffix .doc, and contains the phrase "attitude adjustment." (Of course, if
you knew that much about a file, you'd probably know where it is without having to use
the Search window. But you get the picture.)
To use the Search window, you need to feed it two pieces of information: where you
want it to search, and what to look for. You can make both of these criteria as simple or
complex as you like.
3.2.5. Where to Look
The three phrases at the top of the window—This Mac,"Folder Name,"and Shared— are
buttons. Click one of these to tell Spotlight where to search:
•
This Mac means your entire computer, including secondary disks attached to it (or
installed inside).
•
"Letters to Congress"(or whatever the current window is) limits the search to
whatever window was open when you called up the Spotlight window. So, for
example, if you want to search your Pictures folder, open it first and then hit -
F. You'll see the "Pictures" button at the top of the window, and you can click it to
restrict the search to that folder.

Note: If no folder window is open when you press -F, this button says
"Casey" (or whatever); it identifies your Home folder. That is, Spotlight is
prepared to search all your stuff on this Mac.

Shared. Click this button to expand the search to your entire network and all the
computers on it. (This assumes, of course, that you've brought their icons to your
screen as described in Chapter 13
. If there aren't any shared folders or disks, this
button doesn't appear at all.)
The power of the Spotlight window, though, is that it lets you design much more specific
searches, using over 125 different search criteria: date modified, file size, the "last
opened" date, color label, copyright holder's name, shutter speed (of a digital photo),
tempo (of a music file), and so on. Figure 3-3
illustrates how detailed this kind of search
can be.
To set up a complex search like this, you'll use the second row of controls at the top of
the window.
And third, and fourth, and fifth. Each time you click one of the + buttons at the right end
of the window, a new criterion row appears, whose pop-up menus you can use to specify
what date, what file size, and so on. Figure 3-3
shows how you might build, for example,
a search for all photo files that you've opened within the last week that contain a
Photoshop layer named Freckle Removal.
To delete a row, click the – button at its right end.

Tip: If you press Option, the + button changes into a … button. When you click it, you
get sub-rows of parameters for a single criterion. And a pop-up menu that says Any, All,
or None appears at the top, so that you can build what are called exclusionary
searches.The idea here is that you can set up a search for documents created between
November 1 and 7 or documents created November 10 through 14. Or files named
Complaint that are also either Word or InDesign files.The mind boggles.

Here's a rundown of the ways you can restrict your search, according to the options you
find in the first pop-up menu of a row. Note that after you choose from that first pop-up
menu (Last Opened, for example), you're supposed to use the additional pop-up menus to
narrow the choice ("within last," "2," and "weeks," for example), as you'll read below.