How to find things with Spotlight

Spotlight has been round for years but if you’re like me you may not be using it as well as you can. Here’s an example of a recent search I did that might help you learn some  features of spotlight.

I’m just about to ditch my old G4 powerbook, but it’s the only Mac I have that will read my old Clarisworks files. So I  wanted to convert all my Clarisworks files over to Pages before I threw it out.

So I had to use Spotlight to find all my Clarisworks files.

1. Open spotlight and typd ‘.cwk’ (the old clarksworks file suffix), and press ‘Show All in Finder.’

Here’s what I got:

There are 5 Microsoft files at the top, then a dozen or so pdf documents (with .cwk in the filename.) Then there are a stack of email documents. Right down the bottom if we scroll down we find some ‘Appleworks’ files.

2. Let’s get rid of the file’s we don’t want to help narrow our search. That little plus sign in the top right allows you to narrow down a search, click it and the following will appear:

‘Clarisworks’ doesn’t appear, but there I can  select Kind to be ‘AppleWorks’ by selecting Kind as ‘Other’ and then typing ‘Appleworks’:

That gave me a list of all my appleworks files (489 in total!)

There is another way to refine – specify the results I DON’T want. To do this ‘option’ click on the plus sign and you will get an extra item where you can choose  ‘None of the following are true’. Then you can eliminated the items you don’t want one by one, like this:

This is not how you would find Appleworks files, but excluding unwanted search results from a search is a good way to narrow down a search in other cases.