Apr 17, '08 07:30:02AM • Contributed by: PizzaCake
To overcome this, I type in a line of text in the document (or in a comment) that specifies some combination of Spotlight type, attribute, and search text. I can then highlight this text and use a keyboard shortcut for the Spotlight Services menu item to bring up a Finder window containing matching items. This search can be very precise if required, and has the additional benefit that if the files are moved, they can still be found -- a traditional link would break if you moved the source file.
First set up a keyboard shortcut for Services » Spotlight. Go to System Preferences » Keyboard & Mouse » Keyboard Shortcuts, and add a keyboard shortcut as follows:
- Application: All Applications
- Menu Title: Spotlight
- Keyboard Shortcut: Shift-Command-F
Here are some examples of Spotlight tags I might use. For each of these, I highlight the line of text, then press Shift-Command-F to run a Spotlight search using the selected operators:
- Search for folders named "sites:" kind:folder name:sites
- Search for Pages' documents with either "Spotlight" in their name or contents: filename:pages spotlight
- Search for Numbers' documents with "spotlight" in their name: filename:numbers name:spotlight
- [10.5 only] Search for Keynote documents with the phrase "step one" in them: filename:key "step one"
[robg adds: I tried forcing Pages to create local links by specifying a file:/// URL, but Pages inserts an http:// at the front, so that didn't work. You could work around this by creating a local HTML page that links to the file you'd like to access, but that seems like a lot of work.]
