Searching with Spotlight Search

Introduction: Now, let’s take a look at how we search our Mac using Spotlight Search. Let’s go to my Mac.

Spotlight Search: To search your Mac, what you do is you go up to Spotlight in our menu bar. It’s always going to be located on the right side. You’ll see a little magnifying glass. When I click on it, I get a little field that pops up, and we have our Spotlight Search. Now, there’s an easier way of accessing Spotlight Search.

Using Key Commands to open Spotlight Search: Instead of going up to the menu bar and clicking on the magnifying glass, what I find easier to do is just use Command-Space, and you have to do it in that order, the Command key and the space bar. So, I’m going to hold Command and Space; I get my Spotlight Search. If I were to go and reverse, Space-Command, it would not work. I do need to use Command and then space bar.

Now, how does this work? Well, all we have to do is start typing, and then Spotlight will come back with a number of results. These results are going to be categorized. They can be websites, contacts, files, or even applications. This is how I will typically open up my applications by using Spotlight Search. Let’s go and search for a file. I know I have a file called family budget. I’m not sure where it is.

Viewing Spotlight Search Results: I just start typing in here family, and as I’m typing, we’re going to get different results. Now, you’re going to see that this is categorized. I have my top hits. This is what Spotlight Search thinks I’m looking for. If I were to hit the return key, what it would do is it would open up my parental controls. Why are parental controls included? Because Spotlight Search searches more than just the title. Parental controls include preferences or settings for family options.

Searching within Documents: You’re also going to see I have iCloud here. Again, iCloud includes different settings for family. In addition to searching for the title, Spotlight Search also searches the internal document. If you have a document with the word ‘family’ in it, it’ll come up in my results. Let’s take a look at more of these results. Now, below that, we have my spreadsheets. You can see I have a number of different spreadsheets here. Now, it’s only showing four of them. If I wanted to see more spreadsheets, what I do is I go to the right of spreadsheets here, and you’re going to see “show all.” Click on this, and I can see all of the spreadsheets.

Below that, we have my folders. Again, we have “show all,” so I can see all of my folders. I have ‘family’ in them. I click on any one of them to open it up. I keep scrolling up; I have my documents. Then we also have images. We can see that they’re all categorized here. If I’d like to see a preview of the file, I just click on it once. And then if I want to open it, I just double-click on it. I can also use the arrow keys to make my selection. I generally never use my trackpad or my mouse when I’m using Spotlight. I’ll use Command-Space to pull up the Spotlight field, start typing.

Previewing Results: Then what I will do is I will use the arrow keys to go and find the document that I want. Once I find it, I can see a preview to the right. If it’s the one that I want to open, I just hit the return key and open it up.

Viewing the Path of a File in Spotlight Search Results: Now, let’s say you wanted to find out where this document was on your computer. I’m going to go to the first one here. I want to see where this is on my computer. Well, to do that, what I do is I hold down the Command key. When I do that, I’m going to hold down the Command key. You’re going to see below my preview here, the path. This is on my Drobo in my training files, and it’s called family budget. If I go to the next one here, I’m going to hit the down arrow.

Now, I’m going to hold down the Command key. I can see that this is on my Mac in macOS Mojave in my documents folder. Now I can also open up this folder. Let’s say I don’t want to open up the document. I want to open up the folder. To do that, what I do is I hold down the Command key again. I can see the path. Then all I have to do is just double-click on this. I’m going to double-click, and it opens up that folder.

Opening an Enclosing Folder from Spotlight Search Results: Instead of opening up the document, you can also just open up the folder. This way, you can see all the other files in that folder as well. I mentioned that we could open up applications with this. I’m going to close this window, and now let’s go and Command-Space to bring up my Spotlight Search. Let’s say I wanted to open up numbers. All I have to do is start typing numbers here, and you’re going to see my top hit here is numbers – the application. All I have to do is just hit return, and it’ll open up numbers. It’s my favorite way of opening up applications through Spotlight.

Again, I have my documents that have numbers in them. I have “Other.” And then I have my folders. I know I have a video on ziplining. I’m not sure where it is. I type in here ziplining. I’m going to get different results. You’re going to see we have my movies. I want to see where this is. How do I do that? Hold down the Command key. Now I can see, it is in my documents folder. I also have Siri suggested websites. I have Siri Knowledge, websites, and then I also have web videos. Then if I wanted to open up this video, I just hit the return key.

Spotlight Search Settings: Now we do have a few settings for Spotlight Search. I’m going to close out of this. I’m going to hit the escape key, and it closes it. Now what we do is we go down to our system preferences, and then we go over to Spotlight. This is divided into two different areas here, search results and privacy. With search results, what we can do is we can set what we want to receive results from.

Let’s say I didn’t want to include bookmarks & history from my web browser; I just deselect this. Then when I search, it’s not going to search my bookmarks & history. Let’s say I didn’t want to search fonts; I deselect this. Then when I search for something, it will no longer show me the fonts. If you’re getting results that you no longer want to see, just go into the system preferences and then go to search, and you’ll be able to deselect what you no longer wish to see the category you no longer want to see.

Privacy Options for Spotlight Search: Then we have privacy options. I click on it. From here, what I can do is I can exclude external hard drives as well as folders from my Spotlight results. If I no longer wanted to have any results from my Drobo, what I would do is I would go down to the plus here.

Then what I would do is I would go over to my Drobo here, and then I would click on choose. Then when I do that, what it’s going to do is it’s going to add Drobo to my list here, and it will no longer include any files from Drobo in my search results. Now we can also do this with folders. I go back down to plus. I click on the folder that I no longer want to include. I’m going to go to my documents and let’s go and click on choose. Now it will no longer include documents in my search results.

We can also just drag and drop. What I can do is I can also just drag a folder or an external hard drive onto this window, and it’ll add it to the list. I’m going to go and remove these. So, I’m going to click on documents, click on the minus, and then we have our Drobo. I click on the minus again, and now it’s going to search everything again.

That’s how we search using Spotlight Search on the Mac.