Butterscotch Tutorial Special

Switching to Mac:
Part Six of Ten:
Spotlight

Today, in part 6 of our 10 part series on switching from the PC to the Mac, we’re going to look at the Spotlight.

Well on the Mac the Spotlight is equivalent to the Window Search Menu on Windows. So here to show you is a Windows Vista Virtual Machine, you click here, go to Search and there’s the Window Search box.

You can see if I start to type the word Picture, it starts to display results. The Spotlight on the Mac works is quite similar. The Spotlight can be found up here in the upper right hand corner. Or you can also, trigger it, by pressing commend space.

Now if you start to type in something say, I’m looking for or review identity of the program called Clipmate for Windows. So I start typing in the word, clipmate, you can see that I start getting results. And it will include anything that has the word clipmate in it. This is a database back up from Clipmate, here awards books that have the word clipmate in it, email messages.

If I want to see all of the things that Spotlight found, that contain the word clipmate, I click Show All, as you can see I have a fairly extensive list here. There's Zip Archives I mentioned, some mail messages, some Text Documents and so on.

The Spotlight Indexes your Mac so that you can find things quickly. You can also find the Spotlight Window in every New Finder Window. You can find a Spotlight Window in your System Preferences and you can also find one in programs like Mail, so that you can search through your mail easily using Spotlight.

Spotlight also has some preferences and if there are folders that you don’t want to be indexed by Spotlight, you can indicate those.

So that’s the Spotlight on the Mac and that concludes part 6.