How to Find a File on a Mac

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Jason former Mac genius and what we are going to do today is find a file on Mac OS X. There is a number of ways to do this. We are going to start with the simplest way and the oldest way for older Mac users is to go to the finder and go file find and that is going to bring up a window of a new search and basically that is going to bring up a, there if a file called consignments so I'm going to type in consignment and as you can see as I am typing it is, I misspelled consignment, there we go. As I am typing it is finding these files and there are different ways that it looks for these files under images, html, documents. If we see, here is our file, so it found our file. I'm going to click on it once and when I do that down at the bottom of the window there is a path to this file so we can do anything once we have found this file. We can copy it from here or paste it. If we drag it like that and we hold down our option like in the previous we can copy that file. But this tells us where the file is at. It is in the pictures folder on the hard drive in a folder called NP Navigator EX, 20080812 and there is our consignment file. If we throw away the file from here into the trash it will be thrown away from this location so I wouldn't suggest doing that but you can open the file from here if you want and I'm not going to double click this and open it and another way to find files is up here in the corner you have your spotlight. So I'm going to type in consignment and here again you see the device finding into documents and images and there is our top hit consignment and I'm going to click one time on that and it is actually going to open it in preview. If you go up here whatever you typed in recently will stay up here. Here is a consignment jpeg so let's open that and it is pretty much the same thing. So spotlight is actually a very powerful tool and you can use it for a number of things and if you go down here to spotlight preferences you can actually arrange how you want the system to look for your files so you can if you want it to look for contacts you can just take your contacts, drag that up to the top. You can arrange these in any way shape or form or uncheck them to tell the computer not to search in those files when using spotlight to search. So I'm Jason former Mac genius and that is how you use the basics of spotlight to find a file on Mac OS X. I will talk to you later."