1. Use Spotlight to search for missing files

You go to open that Quarterly Report you just copied over from a thumb drive, but you’ve totally forgotten where you put it. Let Spotlight come to the rescue, right in the Open dialog box. You don’t even have to reach for your mouse: Activate the Spotlight field by pressing Command-F, and then type in the search term for a file or a folder that you’ve misplaced. (There’s a Spotlight field in the Save dialog box, too.)

Using makes searching from within these dialog boxes even more efficient. These special terms limit your searches so that you don’t get as many unwanted results. For example, instead of typing quarterly in the search field when you’re looking for that report, type name:quarterly so you won’t find documents that simply contain the word quarterly. (When you use keywords, make sure there’s no space between the keyword and the colon that follows it; you can leave a space after the colon.)

The two keywords I use most are name and kind. Use name to limit a search to only file names (instead of also looking through a document’s contents). Use kind to specify the file type. When I’m looking specifically for a folder, I type kind:folder FolderName or FolderName kind:folder to avoid scrolling through a long list that includes files with similar names.

2. Customize your sidebar on-the-fly