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today, yesterday, this week, this month, this year. These commands in the second
pop-up menu offer quick, canned time-limiting options.
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within last, exactly, before, after let you be more precise. If you choose Before,
After, or Exactly, your criterion row sprouts a month/day/year control that lets you
round up items that you last opened or changed before, after, or on a specific day,
like 5/27/08. If you choose "within last," you'll see that you can limit the search to
things you've opened or changed within a specified number of days, weeks,
months, or years.
These are awesomely useful controls, because they let you specify a chronological
window for whatever you're looking for.
Tip: You're allowed to add two Date rows—a great trick that lets you round up files that
you created or edited between two dates. Set up the first Date row to say "is after," and
the second one to say "is before."In fact, if it doesn't hurt your brain to think about it, how
about this? You can even have more than two Date rows. Use one pair to specify a range
of dates for the file's creation date, for example, and two other rows to limit when it was
modified.Science!
3.2.7.3. Name
The beauty of Spotlight is that it finds text anywhere in your files, no matter what their
names are. That's why Apple demoted this option—the icon's name—to such a low
position in the pop-up menu.
Anyway, when you want to search for an icon by the text that's only in its name, this is
your ticket. Capitalization doesn't matter.
Of course, if all you want to do is find files whose names include Sales, you may as well
save yourself all of this reading and use the Spotlight menu (or click the File Name
button at the top of the window). But using the Search window offers you far more
control, thanks to the second pop-up menu that offers you these options:
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Apple streamlined the options a bit.
For example, you used to be able to search by label (Section 2.5). You could
therefore easily round up all files pertaining to a certain project for backing up,
deleting, or burning to a CD en masse. That's off the menu as you first see it.
Gone, too, is the Size criterion, which could be helpful when you're trying to
make space on your overstuffed hard drive by ferreting out the huge,
multigigabyte files and folders.
Fortunately, you can restore these options to the criterion pop-up menu easily
enough. The trick is to use the Other option as described on these pages. In the
dialog box shown in Figure 3-4, search for label or size. When you find that
criterion, turn on the "In menu" checkbox and click OK.
Presto: You've got your menu back.
3.2.7.5. Other
If this were a math equation, it might look like this: options x options=overwhelming.
Choosing Other from the first pop-up menu opens a special dialog box containing at least
125 other criteria. Not just the big kahunas like Name, Size, and Kind, but far more
targeted (and obscure) criteria like "Bits per sample" (so you can round up MP3 music
files of a certain quality), "Device make" (so you can round up all digital photos taken
with, say, a Canon camera), "Key signature" (so you can find all the GarageBand songs
you wrote in the key of F sharp), "Pages" (so you can find all Word documents that are
really long), and so on. As you can see in Figure 3-4
, each one comes with a short
description.
Figure 3-4. Here's the master list of search criteria. Turn on the "In menu"
checkboxes of the ones you'll want to re-use often, as described in the box on the
previous page. Once you've added some of these search criteria to the menu, you'll
get an appropriate set of "find what?" controls ("Greater than"/"Less than" pop-
manually. But hey—you never know. Someday, you may remember nothing about a
photo you're looking for except that you used the flash and an F-stop of 1.8.
Tip: Don't miss the Search box in this dialog box. It makes it super-easy to pluck one
useful criterion needle—Size, say—out of the haystack. Also don't forget about the "In
menu" checkbox in the right column. It lets you add one of these criteria to the main pop-
up menu, so you don't have to go burrowing into Other again the next time.
3.2.8. What to Do with Search Results
The Spotlight window has been drastically simplified since the last version of Mac OS X;
it's now a regular old Finder window, with all the familiar views and controls (Figure 3-
5).
Figure 3-5. Click a result once to see where it sits on your hard drive (very bottom).
If the window is too narrow to reveal the full folder path, run your cursor over them
without clicking. As your mouse moves from one folder to another, Leopard briefly
reveals its name, compressing other folders as necessary to make room. (Sub-tip:
You can drag icons into these folders, too.) You can work with anything in the results window exactly as though it's a regular Finder
window: Drag something to the Trash, rename something, drag something to the desktop
to move it there, drag something onto a Dock icon to open it with a certain program,
Option- -drag it to the desktop to create an alias, and so on.
You can move up or down the list by pressing the arrow keys, scroll a "page" at a time
with the Page Up and Page Down keys, and so on. You can also highlight multiple icons
simultaneously, the same way you would in a Finder list view: Highlight all of them by
choosing Edit Select All; highlight individual items by -clicking them; drag
diagonally to enclose a cluster of found items; and so on.
Or you can proceed in any of these ways:
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