Lesson8.Finding Things on Your Mac

Lesson 8. Finding Things on Your Mac

Time	This lesson takes approximately 10 minutes to complete.
Goals	To learn how to locate different types of documents on your Mac, including photos, movies, text documents, and more, using Mac OS X Tiger's Spotlight search feature.

Okay, you're downloading songs, you're creating text documents, you're downloading and importing movie clips, you're doing all kinds of cool stuff, and all the while you're saving these documents in different places on your Mac. Saving stuff is easy. Finding the exact file you want three weeks later has been kind of tough over the years. In fact, although Apple called the feature "Find," it was really more like "Scour," because you spent a lot of time searching before you could actually find the file you wanted. But Mac OS X Tiger changes all of that with a new feature called Spotlight. I have to say Spotlight is somewhat of a mini-miracle unto itself. What makes it so amazingbesides the sheer lightning-fast speed with which it finds filesis that it's designed to help you find files that you don't actually know the exact name of. In fact, if you even have a close stab at what the file name could be or can even remember a word that might be in the document (or if you can't remember either of those things, just that you created the file about a week ago), Spotlight will not only find it for you in seconds, it will actually launch the application you created the file with. Then, it will open the document so you can see if it's the right one. And it does all of this with incredible ease and speed. It actually takes the act of finding files and transforms it from a frustrating, time-intensive task into a quick, fun experience. It's hard to think of a search feature that's cool enough to actually make you smile the first time you use it, but I'll bet you thisSpotlight will do just that. It's one of those things that makes you nod your head and say, "Isn't technology amazing?"