As you know, Spotlight rocks when trying to find that one file that's buried deep down in your folder hierarchy. Simply hit Command+Space (or click on the magnifying glass in the top right corner of your screen), and enter your search string. Spotlight then searches through file names AND file content (text) to find your file. But, what if you are looking for something that isn't named appropriately, nor can you find it based on content? No sweat. We just need to help ourselves.

Believe it or not, Mac OS X allows you to store more than just data with your file... it allows you to store metadata as well! Metadata is data that you never really see. This should be of interest to you because we can use this information to help index (and later search) your files for Spotlight. For example, I have a presentation made in Keynote that is designed to inform the CEO of a company about his IT Department's goals and achievements. A year from now, I may search for this using words like "presentation" and "CEO". The problem is, those words are nowhere to be found in the file itself, so we need to add it as metadata.

To do this, we need to highlight the file, then open the Get Info window (File > Get Info or press Command+I) to show detailed information about the file. When the Get Info window appears, you will quickly see a section at the top designated for additional Spotlight comments. Simply enter appropriate words in this section, and close the window. See the example below:

Now that this metadata is saved with the file, you can use Spotlight to quickly search for it when you need it most!