2/7/24
9:00 am

20 Things You Can Do Faster With Spotlight

The Spotlight menu can sometimes do things faster than using the specific app or window meant for a task on your Mac. You can access system settings, look up words, run Shortcuts, get information, create new contacts and events, and much more.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can get things done faster using the Spotlight Menu.
MacMost is brought to you thanks to a great group of more than 1000 supporters. Go to MacMost.com/patreon. There you can read more about it. Join us and get exclusive content and course discounts. 
Now, of course, you can use the Spotlight Menu on your Mac as a quick way to find Files or Launch Apps. Those are the two things that people use it for the most. But there are a whole bunch of things that can be done a little bit faster using the Spotlight Menu than the normal way. To make sure you have access to all of this you want to go to System Settings and then look for Siri & Spotlight. Then here there is a list of things that are shown in Spotlight. Some of the things I'm going to show you won't work if the item for it isn't checked. So keep that in mind. 
But speaking of System Settings this the first way in which Spotlight can be a bit faster. Normally you would Search here on the left for the Category of the item, like say Keyboard. Then once you get to that section look for the setting you want. Like here's Text Replacements, for instance. You can also can use the Search field here after you've launched Settings. But you can go right to something like Text Replacements or any part of System Settings without even having System Settings running. All you need to do is use the Spotlight Menu, I'm going to use Command Space here to launch it, and then search for that item. so I'm going to search right here for Text Replacements and I don't even have to finish typing the entire thing. It will show up as a hit here, right there System Settings. If I actually typed more you could see it's right there at the top. Now since it is selected I can just press Return and it takes me into System Settings and then right to Text Replacement. This works for just about any spot inside of System Setting.
Now another thing you may want to do in System Settings is to toggle something On or Off. Like for instance here's a switch for Bluetooth. I can turn that On or Off. Sometimes you can toggle things right from the Spotlight Menu. So if I search for Bluetooth you could see I've got the System Setting right here and here's the switch. So I can turn Bluetooth off right here. It works for some other things as well. So, for instance, for Voiceover I get the switch here for Voiceover. 
Your Mac has a built-in dictionary. You can use it using the Dictionary App. So you can launch the Dictionary App and then search for a word. But you could just do it in Spotlight as well. So if I search for a word and say a bunch of different results come up I can jump right to the Dictionary definition with Command L. That brings it right there. You see at the bottom there's the definition. Or alternatively I could use Command D and it actually will launch the Dictionary with the search for the item I was looking for in Spotlight. 
You can do a web search really quickly like this as well. So, let's say you're not in the web browser. Instead of switching to it and then doing a search you could just bring up Spotlight and you could search for something like this. Notice that some of the suggestions here show the little Safari icon. So you can click one of those and it will jump to a search for it. You can do the same thing with a keyboard shortcut. Just type what you want, like this, and do Command B and it instantly searches for that in the web browser. 
Now if you know what you want is in Wikipedia you can do Wikipedia lookups as well without even using the web browser. So I can search for a term like this and now I'm going to use Command K and it will quickly give me the Wikipedia entry for this. Notice there are images here as well. There is some facts from Wikipedia. There's Links. There's other websites and things like that. You've got a link right here where I can click on that and it will go to the Wikipedia entry. 
Now if you have some shortcuts there are various ways to run them. You can set them up as Quick Actions, add them to the Services Menu, add them to the Dock, even add them to this little menu right here. But you can also use Spotlight to run any Shortcut that you've got. You don't have to set anything up in advance. Just use Spotlight and search for the name of the shortcut. I've got one called Uptime. You can see the shortcut appears right there. It's the first hit so I'll just press Return and it runs the shortcut. So the Spotlight Menu can be used as a Shortcut's launcher. 
Now if you want to use your Contacts to, say, send an email to somebody or call them then you may launch the Contacts App first or go to an app like, say, the Mail App and start there. But you can also use the Spotlight Menu, search for the name and it will find that result in your Contacts. Notice here that you've got these little buttons. You can click them to say start FaceTime or send a message or call or start an email. If you actually click on this or press Return you'll actually dig down staying in Spotlight here, give you larger buttons for those and also things like Messages and looking up that person in pdf documents, and Mail messages. All their contact information and everything. So just for looking somebody up you don't even need to go to the Contacts App anymore. 
You can even Add a new contact using Spotlight. So one way to do this would be to start typing a piece of their information. Like let's say their email address. So I'll just type a sample here like this and you could see one of the things I've got is Add Email. I can click there or I can click the 3 dots here and actually call them or send a message directly to them. I can even click here and go right to the Mail App and start composing a message. 
It also works with phone numbers if you do a good format, like this, that can't be mistaken for wanting to do math. So you can see here I can Add Number and it will start a contact with that phone number. 
This also works for Calendar events. You don't have to go to the Calendar, you can just go to Spotlight here and you can type a time. So I can do, say something like, 9am and you can see here the first thing is to add an event for tomorrow at 9 am. But I can get more specific. So I could say 1/20 to add something on the 20th. I can even, you know, type something to use as a title there and then click Add to add it to the calendar. 
You can also look for Photos in your own Photos Library. So without using the Photos App you can search for something. This could be an object in a photo. I could be a name of a person. It could be something in a title or caption of a photo. All the usual stuff you would search for. You can find the various results right here under Photos from Apps. You click Show More to go to the App or you can click on the individual photo to go to the app and jump right to that photo. 
But you can even do more than that. You could export from Photos without having Photos open. So, for instance, let's say I want to take this photo and export it here to the Desktop. I can Drag and Drop from the Spotlight Menu results and you could see it's going to export it right there, like that. Or I can Drag it to something in the Dock, like let's say the Mail App and it will create a new message and attach that image there. All without ever launching the Photos App. 
Now, for course, we've got a Weather App on the Mac. But if you just want a quick look at the weather you don't have to launch that app. You can actually look it up in Spotlight. So you can just search for Weather, for instance, and you'll see here that you'll get the weather listed right here and you can specify a location, like this, and you can see you get it like that. You could even go into more detail, like this. Likewise you could look up sports scores in Spotlight a lot faster than going to the web for it. So I can just type a team name and score, like that, and you can see it shows me the score of the latest game. 
You can also track flights if you know the flight ID. So, for instance, for Delta Airlines 922 I can see it is in route and what time it is going to land. 
Now even simpler than that you can just look up the time. So this is really handy if you're dealing with timezones. So you want to know the time Boston right now. Just type that and you'll get it. 
Another one is to look up Stock information. You can just do that with the stock symbol, like this. This is definitely a little faster than launching the Stock App, especially if you don't already have that stock in your Watch List. 
Now Spotlight may actually be the faster way to do math on your Mac, at least without having to use your voice, like with Siri. You can just bring up Spotlight really quick and just type a math equation and get the result. You can make the equation really complex as well using parentheses, something that is not easy to do when you use the Calculator App, for instance. In addition you can do conversions really quickly using Spotlight. So, for instance, I can convert miles to kilometers, or gallons to liters, or Fahrenheit to Celsius.
Now at the beginning of this video I mentioned how you can use Spotlight to search for files. But people that do that may not even know this trick. You can Drag files from Spotlight to do things with them without having to actually open a Finder window and go to the file. It is similar to what I showed before in Photos. So, for instance, if I search for a file with the name Example I can see several of them listed here. Now if I wanted to Drag this somewhere I could just drag it, say, to the Desktop or to another Finder window and you can see how it is going to make a Copy of it right here. You can also drag files to different apps here in the Dock as well. In case you don't know, in addition to double-clicking to actually open a file, if you want to actually go to the location of the file just select it and use Command R. Then it opens the folder for that file. 
Speaking of opening folders this is my last tip. You can use Spotlight as a way to quickly get to folders. A lot of people may think of Spotlight for looking for a file. But for actually finding a folder they may open up a New Finder Window and then, for instance, go into a specific folder like that. Then maybe even keep digging down deeper. But what if you wanted to go directly to this folder here. You remember its name but you don't want to go through all the steps of opening a New Finder Window and digging down to it. Well, you can do that in Spotlight as well. So I can search for the name of that folder and you can see it is going to come up right there. Since this is the first hit I just press Return and I go right to that folder. 
So there are a whole bunch of different ways that the Spotlight Menu can save you time. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 27 Responses to “20 Things You Can Do Faster With Spotlight”

Jim Goddard

10 months ago

Wow, a lot of additional features and spotlight. Thank you so much.

Brenda Rosenthal

10 months ago

I love your videos.! Being a new Mac desktop user I have watched at least 20 videos to try and get more proficient in using the Mac. Of all the videos yours are truly the best. Thanks.

Bob Rabner

10 months ago

Great video. Very insightful. I was doing a real time comparison to Alfred, which has been my go to for a while now. I was actually surprised to see I would need the powerpack purchase in alfred to do many of the things Spotlight does by default. What are your thoughts on the Spotlight Alfred comparison?

Gary Rosenzweig

10 months ago

Bob: I don't use Alfred. I've never seen a compelling reason to install it or any of its competitors on my Mac.

Fran

10 months ago

I think this is one of the best videos ever to help us save time while using our Mac... Thank you so much.

Eric

10 months ago

Thanks Gary. I'll be putting a lot of those features to use from now on.

nick

10 months ago

Great stuff Gary. I looked for the CMD-R shortcut that shows the file location in System Settings > Keyboard > Shortcut > Spotlight and it's not listed there. Just wondering where it comes from. Thx

Jeff Cunningham

10 months ago

Thanks! so many keyboard stroke savers - amazing.
but airline flights, math calculations and a few others didn't work as demonstrated.
could it be some Settings I don't have correct?

Gary Rosenzweig

10 months ago

nick: I don't think there is a matching setting for it in System Settings.

Gary Rosenzweig

10 months ago

Jeff: Did you check in System Settings, Siri & Spotlight to see if you have turned them off?

Jim Terrinoni

10 months ago

Yes, definitely useful. For me, the Command-R within Spotlight to get to the file in the Finder along with getting to Folders quickly is very valuable. Thank you Gary. Keep up the superior communications.

Thomas Greenbank

10 months ago

Thanks, mate. This was one of the most info-packed videos I've seen in ages.

Dally Messenger III

10 months ago

Brilliant Gary. For me, it will be a game-changer. Always looking for stuff.

Alan Renton

10 months ago

I'm not a regular user of Spotlight but I will be now, I had never realised it was so versatile. Good work.

Marin Tudor

10 months ago

Feeling like coming out of dark ages. Thanks

Geoff

10 months ago

I have tried to drag a photo thumbnail from Spotlight to the desktop, but the thumbnail will not drag.

Bernardo de Brito e Cunha

10 months ago

I've been a PC user for some 45 years, but decided to change to Mac one year ago. It was an entire new world and the doubts were piling out. Your site was definitely the most helpful I have come across and still keep on learning, even though I'm still (and very often) at a loss. Invaluable or 5 stars, that's what I think of your info and help. And I'm only a free user: imagine if I had made a subscription!!!

Gary Rosenzweig

10 months ago

Geoff: From which Spotlight section? Was it Photos From Apps (your photos)? Or was it something else (like images from the web). If from Photos, perhaps that particular image was not downloaded locally, but in iCloud Photos?

Geoff

10 months ago

I just tried to drag a thumbnail that I'm certain is on my computer. It didn't drag.

(Thanks for the very quick response!)

Gary Rosenzweig

10 months ago

Geoff: All I can suggest is to try more things: other photos, other Finder locations. Learn more about what the problem could be and narrow it down.

Geoff

10 months ago

Just tried it with a simple Text Edit document. That dragged from Spotlight to the Desktop.

Thanks for the assistance.

Jonathan

10 months ago

I am trying to use the arrow keys on my Mac keyboard to turn off the Bluetooth slider directly in Spotlight and can’t get this to work. This is important to me because the Bluetooth on my Mac Studio intermittently becomes unresponsive and the only way to reengage it is to toggle Bluetooth off and back on. I use a Magic Mouse so I have no mouse functionality without Bluetooth but I do have the ability to maintain keyboard functionality via the lightening cable.

Jonathan

10 months ago

Gary when I try to reproduce your calendar entry example (which would be incredibly useful) I run into the following problem. When I type 9am just like in your example, I get the option to add a new event at 9am tomorrow in Spotlight. But when I then type "space1/" the "1/" appears as the name of the event. And then when I press "15" the calendar entry disappears entirely in Spotlight. Any insight into what Im doing wrong? Its a pretty straight forward example.

Jonathan

10 months ago

Gary my bad on my Calendar question. I followed your example too closely. We're in February so specifying the date for an event for a date that has already passed in the current year doesn't work but adding the year as 2025 (I/20/2/25) does. Dah. I am going to use this feature a lot. Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

10 months ago

Jonathan: I don't think you'll be able to use the keyboard to toggle off Bluetooth in Spotlight. You could always make a Shortcut to do it in the Shortcuts app. But in your situation have you tried turning the mouse off and on instead of Bluetooth?

Jonathan

10 months ago

Gary, yes I have. Sometimes turning the mouse on and off works, sometimes connecting and then unconnecting it to the Mac via a lightening cable works but there are times when neither of those actions work so I have to resort to either toggling Bluetooth off and on or just restating the Mac.

Michael Nohe

9 months ago

Very helpful, as always.

20 Things You Can Do Faster With Spotlight

Comments: 27 Responses to “20 Things You Can Do Faster With Spotlight”

Leave a New Comment Related to "20 Things You Can Do Faster With Spotlight"

Welcome to MacMost

Free Weekly Newsletter

MacMost Online Courses

Keyboard Shortcuts PDF

Connect with MacMost

MacMost Sections

Popular Tutorials

Information