I use Spotlight daily, mostly to launch programs I don’t have in the Dock. But there’s more to Spotlight than the immediately obvious. So I’ll share with you 5 tips for using Spotlight to the max.
By the way, if you have a Spotlight tip not listed here, feel free to post it as a comment below!
Use Spotlight as a calculator
Did you know that you can use Spotlight as a basic calculator? It’s easy: simply fire up Spotlight, enter an equation (e.g. 6*4) and the result will appear as you type. Neato.
Searching for a phrase
By default, Spotlight searches for files that match any one of the words you enter. For example, if you enter help file, Spotlight will search for files that contain both words anywhere in the file. If you want to search for the occurance of the exact phrase, enclose the word in quotes, like so: "help file".
Look up stuff in Dictionary
The Leopard Dictionary integrates into Spotlight. Type a word into the Spotlight search bar and, if Dictionary finds a corresponding entry, you can launch Dictionary to find all references of that word.
Open an element’s containing folder
Normally, when you click on an item in the Spotlight results, the item is launched. In case of emails, the email is opened in a window, in case of a file, the file is opened with its associated default application. Sometimes it would be nice, not to open a file, but rather open the folder it’s stored in. To do this, simply hold the 
key on your keyboard while clicking the item, and a Finder window with the item selected will open.
Limiting Results
Sometimes, actually many times, Spotlight just returns too many results. Instead of opening the Spotlight window, and browsing through 352 results, prune the results by limiting them to certain types of data, certain date ranges or by adding negative keywords.
Limit results by data type
If you happen to know that you are looking for an email, simply enter your search term into Spotlight and follow it by kind:email. That will immediately filter the results to show only emails containing your search term.
This works with many data types:
- application
- event
- todo
- music
- movie
- bookmark
- and many more
Limit results by date range
If you want to limit your results to files that are not older than a certain date, you can use the created: and modified: operators followed by a date. For example, to find files modified on 3/30/2008, use your search term followed by modified:3/30/2008. If you want to find files that were modified on that date or earlier, use modified:<=3/30/2008. Find files that were modified more recently using modified:>3/30/2008.
Use negative qualifiers
Finally, you can command spotlight to omit results that match a search term by using either a dash or the word NOT. For example, to find all results that match hot but not tabasco, you would enter either hot(-tabasco) (no spaces) or hot NOT tabasco.
Conclusion
As you can see, Spotlight has become a very powerful tool for finding stuff on your Mac. It’s just that it isn’t very obvious looking at the surface, and many of the “goodies” are hidden pretty well. Below you’ll find some additional resources that go a lot deeper into the nitty gritty of Spotlight than I ever could (or want to).
Additional reading
Macworld.com: Create good queries in Spotlight
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/15155.html
Apple.com: Shortcuts for Spotlight
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