Workaround Workshop: Feeding the Barren Pop-up Menus in Mac OS X Leopard

The first little pop-up menu in the Spotlight window lists those handy search starting points: Kind, Last opened date, Name, and so on.

But it's actually less fully stocked than it was in Mac OS Xes of days gone by. Apple streamlined the options a bit.

For example, you used to be able to search by label. You could therefore easily round up all files pertaining to a certain project for backing up, deleting, or burning to a CD en masse. That's off the menu as you first see it. Gone, too, is the Size criterion, which could be helpful when you're trying to make space on your overstuffed hard drive by ferreting out the huge, multigigabyte files and folders.

Fortunately, you can restore these options to the criterion pop-up menu easily enough.

The trick is to use the Other option as described on these pages. In the dialog box shown in Figure 3-4, search for label or size. When you find that criterion, turn on the "In menu" checkbox and click OK.

Presto: You've got your menu back.

Figure 3-4: Here's the master list of search criteria (below). Turn on the "In menu" checkboxes of the ones you'll want to re-use often, as described in the box on the previous page.

Once you've added some of these search criteria to the menu, you'll get an appropriate set of "find what?" controls ("Greater than"/"Less than" pop-up menus, for example).