How often do you use “Spot­light”? This is one of the biggest gems in Mac OS since its Tiger (10.4) introduction.

To acti­vate Spot­light, you can either click on the mag­ni­fy­ing glass on the top right of your screen, or use the key­board short­cut: com­mand + space­bar.
Once you acti­vate Spot­light, type in what you want to find. Every file, from appli­ca­tions to emails to doc­u­ments, are indexed by your computer.

Find the file/application you want, press enter and it will open the doc­u­ment or appli­ca­tion.

Why is this so impor­tant? Well, I never use the dock any­more. I rarely use the Finder to find stuff. Spot­light is where I go for every­thing! It’s faster than tak­ing your hands off of the key­board or search­ing through end­less finder win­dows for that one doc­u­ment from last year…

Remem­ber: com­mand + space­bar!

Notes:
1. Top Hits (most fre­quently accessed files or appli­ca­tions) are always the first hit at the top and are auto­mat­i­cally high­lighted. This makes it super easy to launch appli­ca­tions. Just hit enter when you see the name of your favourite application!

2. Every­thing in your doc­u­ments –not just their names– are indexed by Spot­light. If you can’t remem­ber the file name, but can remem­ber that it had the words “cash­flow” and “Greg Ben­son” in it, type them into Spot­light and the doc­u­ment will show up

3. If you just want to see where a file is rather than open it (like if you want to copy it to your portable USB drive), high­light it, then press com­mand + enter to open its enclos­ing folder

4. If you don’t see the file you’re look­ing for, hit “show all” for a longer list

5. If you’re look­ing for a spe­cific type of file, you can spec­ify what you’re look­ing for right in Spot­light. Just type in a key­word or two, then kind:jpeg, kind:document, kind:pdf, kind:photoshop… you get the idea

6. Want to know a word’s def­i­n­i­tion, syn­onym, etc? Type it into Spot­light and select definition!