#Search for documents on mac how to#
#Search for documents on mac plus#
#Search for documents on mac mac#

All the stuff that comes up is in System Preferences and if you go to Spotlight you can see all these different things that Spotlight looks for. But you're going to come up with lots of other stuff. You can do Command space and you could do a Spotlight search and you'll come up with documents here. So one last mistake that people make when searching is using Spotlight to search for files. So you can do file sizes greater than say a certain amount and narrow down what you've got. As soon as you do that, even though you haven't typed anything in there to begin with, you now have the ability to narrow what you've got. You seem to have to enter something in here.īut all you need to do is use the shortcut. You just want to look for large files for instance.

#Search for documents on mac plus#

We know that we can do a search and then we can after that search is there, whether you're doing it by name or content or whatever, you can hit the plus button and then do something like, you know, create a date or the kind or file size or whatever. But say maybe by date or file size or something. Now another thing you may want to do is to search for something not by name or content at all. As a game developer I have tons of files with dictionaries in them and things like that and if I search for anything I'm going to come up with all sorts of files that aren't what I'm looking for. If you like typing shortcuts you can do it that way.īut that confuses a lot of people especially if you have files that have lots of words in them. A shortcut for that is to type name colon and it automatically does that. So when typing you can select Name Matches and now you get only that. So when you're doing a regular search you're actually searching file names and the content. This may seem confusing but the term is actually in the content of that file. Because if you notice here in my results I have a file right there that doesn't actually even have the name in the name of the file. Now you may also notice when you search for files that you do have the option to search for Name Matches. But no matter which one you have it set at you're best bet is to go to some sort of top level like your Documents folder or your Home folder and start a search from there just to make sure you cover all your bases. So instead of being in the current folder it's wherever you searched last. Video Transcript: You can change the default behavior by going to Finder, Preferences and under Advanced you have When performing a search start in the current folder, the entire Mac, or the previous search scope.

#Search for documents on mac mac#

Spotlight now reindexes the contents of the drive and should find your files properly in the future.Check out 4 Common Mistakes Mac Users Make When Trying To Search For Files at YouTube for closed captioning and more options. Still working in the Spotlight Privacy list, select the drive and click the – button below the list.

(Don’t do this unless it’s necessary since reindexing can take a long time and may impact the performance of your Mac while it’s happening.) Open System Preferences > Spotlight > Privacy, and then drag your drive (or the drive on which Spotlight isn’t finding files) into the list of locations that Spotlight shouldn’t search. To fix the problem, you can force Spotlight to rebuild its index.

Sometimes, however, Spotlight fails to turn up a file that you know is present, likely due to index corruption. Press Command-Space or use the Search field in a Finder window, and it finds everything that matches your search term.

#Search for documents on mac how to#

Having Trouble Finding Files on Your Mac? Here’s How to Reset Spotlight MaMac, Newsįor the most part, Spotlight works well.