Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
more than one word:
AUTHOR:"KEIRTHOMAS"
will return documents and emails cre-
ated by Keir Thomas, for example.
Limiting Spotlight Results to Particular Dates
You can have Spotlight return results only for those files created or modified
on a particular day. To do so, type
DATE:
followed by
TODAY
or
YESTERDAY
in the
search field to see only those files created or modified today or yesterday. You
can also specify a date:
DATE:10/3/2011
will return files created or modified on
October 3, 2011, for example. (Those outside of the United States should use
native date formats instead:
DATE:3/10/2011
, for example.)
You can also specify date ranges:
DATE:8/1/2011-8/31/2011
will return files created
or modified in the month of August 2011, for example.
Specifying Words NOT to Search For
Let's say you're using the Spotlight search tool to find emails mentioning
getting an iPad as a present for your friend John. You perform a search using
the keywords
ipad
and
john
and find that, along with the emails you're looking
for, there are also emails from Frank discussing how cool the iPad is. You
don't want to see those emails.
To stop a particular word from appearing in Spotlight's results, you can add
a minus before it.
Using the previous example, the following would return results that specifi-
cally don't include any mention of Frank:
JOHN IPAD -FRANK
Another way to refine searches is to use AND, OR, and NOT (these are known
as
Boolean operators
). For example, to search for a message containing either
the word
ipad
or
tablet
, you could type the following:
IPAD AND TABLET
It's important that AND, OR, and NOT are typed in uppercase, because oth-
erwise Spotlight will consider them part of the search string.