Oct 24

So you already know how powerful spotlight is. It searches files, it’s a calculator, a dictionary, it’s just plain cool. I use spotlight every day, I’d rather use it than the dock or finder in most cases! Today I watched a video on the apple.com website on boolean searching in Spotlight.

Say you want to search for a document with “marketing” in the filename, and it’s a presentation. You’ve got several presentations for different years, eg Marketing 2007, Marketing 2008, Marketing 2006, etc. You want to find all the Marketing files that are NOT 2006.. In spotlight type:

marketing NOT 2006

You can use different operators however they must be in CAPS, Eg. NOT, AND, OR.

Perhaps you have “DVD Marketing 2007″ and “Blu-Ray Marketing 2007″. You want the DVD file..

marketing AND DVD

Give it a go!

written by James \\ tags: , ,

One Response to “Boolean searches in Spotlight”

  1. Paul Says:

    And if you have hundreds of files or research documents or web pages with marketing buried deep within the contents, you will get those too. And not easily find the files you want. It’s not a well-designed interface.

Leave a Reply