The Spotlight Window phần 2

today, yesterday, this week, this month, this year. These commands in the second pop-up menu offer quick, canned time-limiting options. within last, exactly, before
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The Spotlight Window phần 2 • today, yesterday, this week, this month, this year. These commands in the second pop-up menu offer quick, canned time-limiting options. • 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, youll see that you can limit the search to things youve opened or changed within a specified number of days, weeks, months, or years.These are awesomely useful controls, because they let you specify a chronologicalwindow for whatever youre looking for.Tip: Youre allowed to add two Date rows—a great trick that lets you round up files thatyou created or edited between two dates. Set up the first Date row to say is after, andthe second one to say is before.In fact, if it doesnt hurt your brain to think about it, howabout this? You can even have more than two Date rows. Use one pair to specify a rangeof dates for the files creation date, for example, and two other rows to limit when it wasmodified.Science!3.2.7.3. NameThe beauty of Spotlight is that it finds text anywhere in your files, no matter what theirnames are. Thats why Apple demoted this option—the icons name—to such a lowposition in the pop-up menu.Anyway, when you want to search for an icon by the text thats only in its name, this isyour ticket. Capitalization doesnt matter.Of course, if all you want to do is find files whose names include Sales, you may as wellsave yourself all of this reading and use the Spotlight menu (or click the File Namebutton at the top of the window). But using the Search window offers you far morecontrol, thanks to the second pop-up menu that offers you these options: • Contains. The position of the letters you type doesnt matter. If you type then, you find files with names like Then and Now, Authentic Cajun Recipes, and Lovable Heathen. • Starts with. The Find program will find only files beginning with the letters you type. If you type then, you find Then and Now,but not Authentic Cajun Recipes or Lovable Heathen. • Ends with. If you type then, you find Lovable Heathen,but not files called Then and Now or Authentic Cajun Recipes. • Is.This option finds only files named precisely what you type (except that capitalization still doesnt matter). Typing then wont find any of the file names in the previous examples. It would unearth only a file called simply Then. In fact, a file with a file name suffix, like Then.doc, doesnt even qualify. (If this happens to you, though, heres a workaround: From the first pop-up menu, choose Other; in the dialog box, pick Filename. The Filename criterion ignores extensions; it would find Then.doc even if you searched for then.)3.2.7.4. ContentsYou can think of this option as the opposite of Name. It finds only the text thats insideyour files, and completely ignores their icon names.Thats a handy function when, for example, a documents name doesnt match its contents.Maybe a marauding toddler pressed the keys while playing KidPix, inadvertentlyrenaming your doctoral thesis xggrjpO#$5%////. Or maybe you just cant rememberwhat you called something. WORKAROUND WORKSHOP Feeding the Barren Pop-up Menus The first little pop-up menu in the Spotlight window lists those handy search starting points: Kind, Last opened date, Name, and so on. But its actually less fully stocked than it was in Mac OS Xes of days gone by. 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. Thats off the menu as you first see it. Gone, too, is the Size criterion, which could be helpful when youre 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: Youve got your menu back.3.2.7.5. OtherIf 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 least125 other criteria. Not just the big kahunas like Name, Size, and Kind, but far moretargeted (and obscure) criteria like Bits per sample (so you can round up MP3 musicfiles of a certain quality), Device make (so you can round up all digital photos takenwith, say, a Canon camera), Key signature (so you can find all the GarageBand songsyou wrote in the key of F sharp), Pages (so you can find all Word documents that arereally long), and so on. As you can see in Figure 3-4, each one comes with a shortdescription. Figure 3-4. Heres the master list of search criteria. Turn on the In menu checkboxes of the ones youll want to re-use often, as described in the box on the previous page. Once youve added some of these search criteria to the menu, youll get an appropriate set of find what? controls (Greater than/Less than pop- up menus, for example).You may think that Spotlight is offering you a staggering array of file-type criteria. Infact, though, big bunches of information categories (te ...