Join Sharon Zardetto as she explores the hidden depths of Spotlight searching, one of Mac OS X's most powerful yet least explained features. No matter how carefully you organize files and folders on your Mac, it's easy to lose important items. With Sharon's help, you can aim Apple's Spotlight quickly and precisely, and stop rummaging around in the darkness of your hard disk.

After Sharon explains how Spotlight indexes your data and the "grammar" behind Spotlight searches, you'll discover the many ways you can start Spotlight searches: the magnifying glass in the menu bar, the search field in Finder windows or the Open and Save dialogs, a keyboard shortcut, a contextual menu, or the customized and saved searches you've made for yourself.

Then it's on to learning how to find exactly what you're looking for using keyword searches, multiple-criteria searches, Boolean searches, and more. And here's where you'll learn the most valuable lesson about Spotlight, which Apple has never shared, which is how to search directly using Spotlight's internal search language, making even complex searches quick and easy.

You'll learn these search-related techniques:

In addition, you'll find out how to make your files even easier to find with these techniques:

In these days of terabyte drives, your Mac has enormous storage capacity, and you may have many thousands of files squirreled away (we don't even want to admit to how many hundreds of thousands of files are filling up our disks!). But with the Spotlight expertise you'll gain from this ebook, you'll be able to retrieve anything on your Mac, no matter how deeply it's buried or how specific you need to make your search (how about every GarageBand song in the key of E-flat, or every graphic that's smaller than 500 by 500 pixels?).