24 | MACFORMAT | DECEMBER 2019 macformat.com @macformatFind faster with Spotlight & Siri
Stop wasting time searching for stuff – use Spotlight and Siri for speedy results!
1
Let Siri suggest stuff
Catalina adds Siri Suggestions to your
favourite apps. In Safari, Siri can suggest
websites you might want to visit; in
Contacts it focuses on the people it thinks
you’re most likely to contact; in Mail it
recognises events in emails and adds
them to a Siri Suggestions calendar. If
you’d rather not have those suggestions
you can turn them off on a per-app basis
in System Preferences > Siri.2
Find system features
Siri enables you to access system
and app features as well as to look things
up, so for example if you have ‘Enable Ask
Siri’ checked in System Preferences > Siri
you can say “turn on Do Not Disturb”,
“create a meeting for today at 11am” or
“How much free space do I have?” You
can make your screen brighter, launch an
app, create an email to a specific person,
send a message, search for something in
your Photos library, find a podcast with
a particular host... Siri on Mac is now as
useful as it is on iOS.3
Share from Siri
If you ask Siri to search the web forimages, you can then drag images from
the results onto your desktop, into an
email or onto a document. Siri drags the
full image, not the thumbnail it showed
you. The feature is a little hit-and-miss
for other kinds of content, though: for
example, if the result is a piece of
information, you’ll need to highlight
the text and copy it manually.4
Save Spotlight searches
When you use Spotlight to search inthe Finder, you can save your search
as a Smart Folder that you can run
instantly at any time. This puts it in
SavedSearches and you can also add
it to Finder’s Sidebar.5
Scale down Spotlight
If you find Spotlight is searching too
many things or taking too long, you can
limit its scope in System Preferences >
Spotlight – so if you never look for
fonts or films, you can exclude them.FEATURE 87 timesaving tips
>Since High Sierra, you can also
get Siri Knowledge when you
≈-click on a word or phrase to
get its definition and thesaurus
entry. This gathers information
from multiple sources to give you
more information about the word
or term you’ve selected.
It can be a bit unpredictable
sometimes: for example, if you
look up “pedigree”, Siri gives you
information about the ‘facebuster’
wrestling move. You can disable
Siri Knowledge in System
Preferences > Spotlight.Get Siri Knowledge
Not got the knowledge? Then Siri might have! Siri
Knowledge gathers info from multiple sources.You can use Siri to search
for images online and then
drag the full image over.Let Spotlight suggest
>If you don’t disable them in Spotlight’s
preferences, Spotlight Suggestions
look beyond your computer for search
results. For example, when you search
for a musician, Spotlight provides links
to online videos; when you search for
a film it will link to imdb.com and the
YouTube trailer.