How to Explore Spotlight

1 Weather forecasts

Type ‘weather’ and you should get a result under the title ‘weather’ and/or ‘top hits’. Select it to see current conditions, predictions for the next six hours, and a 10-day forecast. Tap Return to visit Weather.com. To see the forecast for a specific location, add the location after ‘weather’.

2 Sports scores

Scores for (mostly American) sports can be found, such as American football and baseball, but the English Premier League and other major football leagues are also available. Type something like ‘Arsenal score’ and you’ll find the most recent result. Scroll down and you’ll see fixtures.

CONTINUED… Explore Spotlight

3 Fixtures and squads

To see the results of a specific game without looking through the fixtures list, use a search term along the lines of ‘Chelsea Everton game’. You can see a team line-up using the rather American-sounding ‘roster’. So ‘Liverpool roster’ or ‘Yankees roster’ will list a team’s players and their positions.

4 Stocks and shares

Apple seems obsessed with stocks and shares, given that it welds a Stocks app to every iPhone, so at least some people must find this information useful. If that’s you, type a ticker symbol into spotlight to see the current share price. You can also type a company’s name, followed by ‘stock’.

5 Online videos

In theory, Spotlight enables you to quickly find online videos, but right now the system appears limited. Type in a search term – be specific – followed by ‘YouTube’ or ‘Vimeo’ and you might get a result. Hit Return and Safari will open to play your chosen video.

6 Transit info

At present, transit is disappointingly limited in Apple Maps, and it’s of perhaps limited use in Spotlight anyway, unless you cart a MacBook about. In the UK you can type in a London station to list its connections, see photos of the station, and, somewhat bizarrely, see reviews on Yelp.

7 Local shopping

This isn’t new to macOS Sierra, but Spotlight enables you to access other information lurking in Maps. Type ‘Apple Store’ and you’ll see your nearest stores under a Maps heading. Many other terms are recognised: shops, pubs, cinemas and even types of food.

8 Recent apps

For compatible apps, search for and select an app and recent documents will be listed under the icon in the preview area. You can click one to open it. If you’re wedded to the keyboard, you can instead hit Tab to move your focus to the documents list, and then use the arrow keys and .