Making a document smart folder that works

by tech_rules Apr 6, 2009 4:44PM PDT

Hi everyone here is my problem.

I want to make a smart folder in leopard that contains all my documents. The one that comes prebuilt into leopard also contains movies and audio files. I would like a folder that only contains word,excel, keynote and open office documents.

I tried making one with the criteria:
Name contains .key OR .doc OR .odt

It finds some of the documents not all of them. My word pages and keynote documents refuse to show up when the rest that I add do.

How do I make a smart folder that will do what I want.

Any help will be greatly appreciated

Discussion is locked

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Making a document smart folder that works

by Moonlight Gambler Apr 20, 2009 10:51PM PDT

I'm new to the World of Apple, but perhaps this will help:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.4/en/mh2152.html

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Smart folders

by mrmacfixit Forum moderator Apr 25, 2009 12:37AM PDT

I took a look at this problem this morning and found that there is no place to add any OR criteria to the search.

Any search created within the Smart Folder utility is strictly an AND search.

Searching for .doc(no need for the .) will produce a list of every doc file on your computer.
Hitting the + sign to produce another row and putting .xls into the extension field does not turn up any results.
This is because the search is structured as an AND search and you have no files that match both the requested criteria.
This, directly from the help file
quote:
When you add another row, it?s as if you?re connecting it to previous rows with ?and? because an item must match all rows to appear in the search results. For example, if one row searches your computer for items whose name begins with S and you add a row to search for items created Today, an item must match both criteria.
unquote.
As you specifically said that you had used the OR criteria, how did you actually do it, or did you assume that if the next line was there, with different criteria, that it was an OR situation.

There used to be a search function like that but I have not seen it for a while

P

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This is how

by tech_rules Apr 27, 2009 4:24PM PDT

I added name matches(then in the box).key OR .xls OR .xlsx OR .ppt OR .pptx They were all in the same box

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Don't have that option in my version, 10.5.6

by mrmacfixit Forum moderator Apr 27, 2009 9:53PM PDT

when making a smart folder in Finder.

It is strictly an AND function.

Where do you choose the OR function from? Or do you just type it into the extension box?

Confirm you are doing this in Finder and not inside another app.

P

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i am using 10.5.6

by tech_rules Apr 28, 2009 3:47PM PDT

I hit the plus then chose name as the type. Then I made the line say name matches. Then in the box where you normally type the name I typed ".key OR .xls OR .xlsx OR .ppt OR .pptx". using this method the search finds some of the documents but not all of them. For example the keynote ones show up but the xlsx ones don't.

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Can't do that successfully,

by mrmacfixit Forum moderator Apr 28, 2009 9:51PM PDT

just typing OR does not make it so.

Back to my original statement, this search is an AND search only.

P

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And Yet

by tech_rules Apr 29, 2009 4:19PM PDT

And yet it works

I think that the problem which I had original has been solved. The problem was that iwork hid the extensions of the files(so did Microsoft office) Now that I have set both to keep the file extension in the file name. (so instead of untitled it now says untitled.docx )So this means that the document smart folder now finds all of my documents. And about typing OR I does mean that it becomes OR.

Anyway thank you for your help

Making a document smart folder that works

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