Tired of searching for applications in a messy dock or having to launch Finder and wade around for the right file or application? A little used feature to most Mac newbies, (me included, until a few weeks ago), is OS X’s Spotlight. Spotlight does an awesome job at searching for files, but my biggest use for it is launching applications.

The first step to launching applications with Spotlight is to press command (the apple key) and the space bar at the same time. This will launch Spotlight, from there I type the first few letters of the application or file that I want to launch. For example, if I want to launch iCal I would type ic and then hit return to launch iCal. All that is needed is enough letters to distinguish the application. For example, typing ic will bring up iCal but if I wanted to launch iChat I would have to type ich.

Using Spotlight, I can access any application or file in a few seconds with a couple key strokes. Although Spotlight is great for launching applications it is not limited to just applications. Spotlight can find iCal calendar appointments, tasks, e-mail messages stored in Mail, and pretty much any other files that are in OS X. So, stop wasting time manually searching for files and applications and give spotlight a try.