Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com.
On this episode let's take a look at some of the new Spotlight features in El Capitan.
So let's start off by launching Spotlight which you can do by clicking the icon up here.
I like to use the keyboard shortcut which is Command and Space and bring it up.
Now the first thing I want to show you that is new in El Capitan is the ability to get
weather.
If I just type the word weather actually it will come up with weather from my local area.
It also shows me other things in case that is not what I wanted like if I wanted some
files or suggested web sites.
Things like that.
I can customize this.
You can see there it has kind of prompted me to customize it.
I can say weather in and get a more accurate forecast by typing in the name of a city like
that.
I can not only find a more accurate one but say if I'm traveling somewhere I can get the
forecast for that.
You can see it is kind of a nice forecast over here.
It gives you hourly, it gives you the general forecast there, it gives you a ten day, and
then a link to go to weather.com where probably this information comes from so you can get
even more details.
You can also do the same for sports.
So you can type in the name of a sports team and then something like if you just leave
it like that it will show you the most recent score or you can type in schedule and you
can get information like that.
The schedule will even go further in advance.
Of course if you can do weather and you can do sports you can do stocks.
It is as easy as just typing in a stock symbol, except that sometimes it's not because sometimes
stock symbols look like file names or something that you might be searching for.
So it is more useful to type in something like stock and then the stock symbol.
The great thing is that it seems to work really well even if you don't know the stock symbol.
Which is good because that happens a lot and a lot of services require you to enter the
stock symbol.
If you don't know it you have to do a look up of the stock symbol.
It's nice to be able to do this.
You also do a search through your own files using natural language.
For instance, you can do something like documents created this week.
I find that it not only will give you documents created this week but will kind of do it in
ever expanding amounts.
So kind of like when you search the web.
You might search for something and the first hit might be exactly what you want but the
second, third, fourth, and going through many pages may give you other options.
So it might go beyond this week but just be more documents.
Maybe things that aren't documents but were created this week.
If I had more stuff in this test account it probably would just give me those specific
items and less of ones that may or may not fit that criteria.
You can do things like pdf's created this week.
You can search emails, emails sent this week.
All sorts of things like that.
So basically the type of document in terms of created or updated or modified and then
things like this week, today, yesterday, this year, etc.
You can use terms like photos, for instance, and it won't search in the photos app but
it will search for images that are stored in your user folder.
For a more Siri like experience you can bring up Spotlight and then use dictation which
the default is hitting the fn key twice.
So if you do that and then you can speak your query you'll automatically get a search performed.
PDF's I viewed last week.
Now how Spotlight searches can be determined by going to System Preferences and then go
to Spotlight.
Then there you can choose which items show up.
So, for instance, if you are sick of seeing your huge selection of fonts show up in results
you can turn that off.
There is lots of other different things that you can turn on or off here that will or will
not appear.
Also if there is something that you don't want it to search.
Like, for instance, you may have a folder filled with tons of files from an old project
you can add them to Privacy here.
Just add any folder that you want and Spotlight will then stop searching that particular folder.
So you can really highly customize these things.