Spotlight is Mac’s desktop file search utility. It is fast, intuitive and thorough. Spotlight searches everything, not just your docs or file folders. It includes your address book, email, calendar, preferences, everything. For instance, type your sister’s name into Spotlight and it will show emails received from her or sent to her, calendar entries (such as her birthday), documents that have her name in them, your address book entry for her, everything in your Mac that includes her name.

Spotlight doesn’t just search the names or headlines; it searches metadata, or the information contained in the file that’s about the file. That includes the date the file was created, who created it and other pertinent information. So, if you downloaded a picture of your niece last week, you can find it by searching for files from last week, for photos or the file name.

Spotlight is quick because it starts searching as soon as you start typing, beginning with the first letter and narrowing the search as you type.

What if you don’t want Spotlight to search every last thing on your computer? You can change your preferences in the System Preferences menu. Open it and choose Spotlight. It will open up a pane that shows all the areas of your Mac that Spotlight is currently searching. Click the boxes to deselect the ones you want Spotlight to ignore.

You can prevent private files from showing up in Spotlight searches, too. Go to System Preferences and choose Spotlight. Click on the Privacy tab. You can either drag files or folders onto the pane or click on the plus sign at the bottom of the pane and select the files you want kept private by clicking on them.

Another way to use Spotlight is to create Smart files. Smart files automatically update as you change, add or delete files on your computer. You can take the Spotlight search you did on your sister, and create a Smart folder for it. Now, whenever you email her or she emails you or whatever, the file will go in that folder. You don’t have to repeat the search or update the file.

Once you get used to using Spotlight it will become one of your most-used programs. You’ll never have to go looking through file folders again’just start typing in Spotlight and the files you need will appear. It’s as easy as that.

To see Apple’s QuickTime demo of Spotlight, click here