Today’s tip goes hand-in-hand with this previous Spotlight tip dealing with navigating your results. When I wrote that tip back in April, one thing frustrated me about Spotlight’s search results window (the window that drops down from the menu bar when you perform a Command-Space search) was that it wasn’t simple to just show the selected match in the Finder. Back then, I thought you had to select the Show All option to bring up the full Spotlight window, control-click on the file you were interested in locating, and then pick Reveal in Finder from the pop-up menu.
Thanks to a recent tip, however, I now know a much, much, much simpler solution—there’s no need to even open the full Spotlight results window. Instead, just hold down the Command key and click on an entry in the drop-down list of Spotlight’s matches. When you do, a new Finder window will open to the folder containing the item you selected. This won’t work with iCal events, Mail messages, or bookmarks, but it seems to work just fine for everything else I tested—even including Contacts.
Sometimes it’s the simple things that make Spotlight a bit more useful for me!