Opening Applications with Spotlight Search

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Learn how to open an application on the Mac using Spotlight Search.

In this lesson for the Mac, I look at how you can open applications using Spotlight. This is how I usually will open an app, using Spotlight Search. You basically search for the app, then once it is selected in Spotlight, you can open it it up just by pressing the Return key. See how this works in my lesson on opening apps with Spotlight Search on the Mac.

Video Transcript (video also has closed captions):

Introduction: In this video, I’m going to take a look at how it can open up apps through Spotlight. This is one of my favorite ways to open up apps through Spotlight. Now, I know I haven’t covered Spotlight yet. That is coming later on in the tutorial, but I at least wanted to show you how you can use Spotlight to open up apps. It’s pretty simple. Let’s see how we do this. Let’s go to my Mac.

Using Spotlight to Open an App: Now, Spotlight is what we’ll use to search our Mac. If we want to search for a file, if we want to search for a folder, well, we can also use it to open up apps. If we go to the upper right-hand corner, you’re going to see we have the magnifying glass. I click on it, and now we have our Spotlight search. All I have to do now is start typing the name of the app that I want to open and then hit return. I want to open up the calendar app. I begin typing calendar, and you’re going to see one of the top hits is the calendar app. All I have to do now is double click on it, and it opens it up, but we can even make this easier or faster.

Keyboard Shortcut for opening Spotlight Search: Another way of pulling up Spotlight search is by using the command key and the space bar. Hit the command key, and then the space bar, you have to do it in that order. Command and then space. We have our Spotlight search, and now all I need to do is type in calendar, and you’re going to see it highlighted calendar automatically. Now, all I have to do is hit return. I never even had to use my mouse or my trackpad. Let’s go and do that for contacts. Command space, I start typing in contacts. You’re going to see it pulls it up as a top head I hit return, and now contacts is open. I want to open up reminders, command-space; I start typing reminders, it comes up as a topic, but it did not highlight it. Now, what I need to do is I need to use the arrow key to go up to reminders. Now that Reminders is selected, I hit return, and it opens it up.

That’s how we can use Spotlight to open up apps on the Mac.

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