
Click it to see the full-blown entry in the preview pane. So if you type a word-say, myrmecophile-into the search box, you see the Dictionary definition in the results. Or, more specifically, it’s wired directly into macOS’s own dictionary, which sits in your Applications folder. The Spotlight menu is a full-blown English dictionary, too. If you use Messages ( Chapter 20), Spotlight also finds the lucky members of your buddies lists. Spotlight can even find photos according to who is in them (using the Faces feature in Photos) or where they were taken (using its Places feature). Spotlight also finds matching information within your Mac programs: every email message, Contacts entry, calendar appointment, web bookmark, System Preferences panel, To Do item, chat transcript, dictionary definition, and website in your History list. (The search box doesn’t find text in the middles of words, though it searches from the beginnings of words.) For example, if you’re trying to find a file called Pokémon Fantasy League.doc, typing just pok or leag would probably suffice. In the Spotlight search box, you can type part of its name or some text that appears inside the document you want.
#Mac search for file type download
doc to find Word files), download source (type to find programs you downloaded from that site), sender (a name or email address), or Finder tag ( Tip). Spotlight can also find things according to their file types (type.
#Mac search for file type pdf
Any file, folder, program, picture, movie, PDF document, music file, Microsoft Office document, and even font, regardless of its name or folder location. That is, you can type out plain-English queries that describe what you’re looking for, like “files I worked on in January,” “slides from 2016 containing WidgeTech,” or “images from last year.”Īs you’d expect, Spotlight can round up anything with an icon on your Mac. It can not only do math, but it can also convert things: kilometers to miles, Celsius to Fahrenheit, euros to dollars, and so on.Īnd it can pull down more information types from the Internet, like sports scores (and schedules and rosters and player stats), Twitter handles (and hashtags), weather, stock quotes, and lists of Vimeo and YouTube videos.įinally, you can now use “natural language” searches.

As a bonus, it’s also the world’s most flexible calculator.

#Mac search for file type movie
Spotlight shows matches for your search word beyond your Mac it can fetch results from the web, from Apple’s app and music stores, in the Maps app, from movie theaters, and so on. That may sound like breathless hype, but wait till you try it. But Spotlight, a star feature of macOS, combines these two functions in a way that’s so fast, so efficient, so spectacular, that it reduces much of what you’ve read in the previous chapters to irrelevance.

And every system offers several different ways to open them. Every computer offers a way to find files.
