Friday, December 26, 2008

Smart Folders in Finder; Search Criteria (Any, All, None)

So one of the first things I wanted to do since the Mac became my main machine is change the behavior of the Smart Folders in Finder. The Smart Folders are the icons you see in Finder under "SEARCH FOR" in the left-hand column.

What I was really aiming to do is use these for documents only (and by documents I mean word, excel, etc.), and remove the search criteria for video and images. So if you click on one of those Smart Folder guys and then the gear button on the top of the Finder window, you'll get a drop-down with an option to select "Show Search Criteria." Once you click that, you'll see how Finder is filtering out your files for that particular Smart Folder.

Now, the part I couldn't figure out was how to replicate the "None of the following are true" functionality that is found in the default Smart Folders "Today," "Yesterday," and "Past Week." If you click on one of the Plus buttons in the search criteria, you'll see that the option for "None" or "Any" isn't present. To get these options, you need to hold down Option (Alt) and the Plus button will change to (...). Then, once you click the new button, you'll get the option to add criteria for "Any," "All," and "None."

Problem solved... Smart Folder creation/modification complete!

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