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Spotlight is an easy way to find anything on your MacBook Air, such as images, documents, contacts, calendar events, and email messages. You can also use Spotlight to open apps or perform quick actions, like starting a Focus.
Nov 3, 2021 · I used to be able to quickly open applications on my Macbook M1 2020 by searching for them using Spotlight search. But ever since I updated to Monterey the applications do not show up at the top of the search, I have to scroll down at least 15 entries to open the application I searched for.
Table of Contents. Spotlight settings on Mac. On your Mac, use Spotlight settings to change the categories that appear in Spotlight search results. Popular topics. Use Spotlight to find something quickly. Browse through the options below for details about customizing your settings.
Jan 5, 2018 · Click and hold the Spotlight icon on the menu bar, until the Spotlight window has returned to its original location.
- Invoke Spotlight Search Quickly
- Search Apps by Their Initials
- Perform Calculations
- Define Words
- Convert Units
- Filter Spotlight Search Results
- Exclude A Folder from Spotlight Search Results
- Search Specific Kinds of Files
- Search with Boolean Operators
- Clear Spotlight Search Quickly
One of the basic yet essential Spotlight tricks is to use a keyboard shortcut to invoke Spotlight Search from anywhere on the system. While the default way to do this, preferred by most users, is to click on the magnifier icon in the menu bar, using a keyboard shortcut — Command+Space— makes the process a lot quicker.
Most of us find an app on our Mac by either entering its full name in the Spotlight Search window or entering a part of it for Spotlight to find a match and return the appropriate app. While this works just fine, there is a much quicker and easier way to do this, which involves searching for an app using its initials. So, say you want to run Sublim...
Spotlight Search makes performing calculations on a Mac extremely easy: you simply type the equations you want to solve in the Spotlight Search window to get the results without having to open the calculator app. It is, however, only possible to do basic calculations on Spotlight.
Although there are various dictionary apps (and also Google search) to look up meanings of words, Spotlight saves you a few steps and puts the same functionality at your fingertips. So you can simply invoke the search and type “define”, followed by the word you want meaning of, and Spotlightwill return its definition.
Much like calculations, converting units is another useful functionality that you get with Spotlight Search. To use it, enter a value-unit pair that you want to convert along with the unit in which you want the result. For example, if you need to convert 10 km to miles, enter “10km to miles”. Besides converting units, you can also use SpotlightSear...
By default, Spotlight Search helps you find items across a broad range of categories like applications, bookmarks, contacts, folders, music, etc. However, if you want to declutter the results or do not want to see results for specific categories, Apple lets you disable SpotlightSearch results for such categories. To do this, open System Preferences...
Similar to filtering Spotlight Search results by preventing item indexing from specific categories, you can also exclude specific folders on your Mac to prevent Spotlightfrom searching for items in them. You might want to do this to avoid unnecessary (temporary files) from being indexed, which can sometimes lead to irrelevant results. To do this, o...
For times when you want to find a particular file type on your Mac, Spotlight Search offers the option to modify searchparameters to increase your chances of finding the correct file. You can do this by typing out the file name and appending “kind: format_type”. For example, if you want to look for a PDF file with the name “sample”, you will enter ...
In addition to using search operators for advanced search filtering, you can also use boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) for complex search queries. For example, if you want to find a PDF file named “sample” that was created on, say, March 1, 2021, you need to enter “sample kind:pdf AND 1/3/2021” into Spotlight search to find it on your Mac.
When you make a query on Spotlight Search — irrespective of whether you act on its result or not — you will notice that the query remains in Spotlight even when you invoke Spotlight next time, requiring you to clear it before entering another query. You can, of course, do this by hitting the Delete key. However, there is a more efficient way of doi...
Jan 25, 2021 · Apple adds new features to Spotlight in every major macOS release, so it’s easy to lose count of all the features. So, today I’ll tell you about all the cool things you can do with Spotlight on a Mac.
Jan 17, 2022 · You can always root around in the Applications folder for them, but for speedier access, invoke Spotlight and type the first few characters of the app’s name (Spotlight will guess at what you want; if it’s wrong, keep typing).
