What is this 'alt' key you speak of? ;)

"Alt" is the Windows term. On the Mac, it's the "option" key. On newer Macs, the option key also has, in smaller print, the world "alt," possibly to help former Windows users make the transition. I still marvel when Mac users refer to it as the "alt" key. But perhaps they were former Windows users. (?)

I have PowerBook G4 I bought in 2003 and it has "alt" written on the option key as well. I've never seen it in the 5 years I've had this laptop until I read these comments. I still wouldn't call it the alt key, though.

All Macs in the UK have come with 'alt' instead of 'option' for years (at least seven years, probably longer but that's the oldest Mac in the house for me to check).

It may be the case on other non-US Mac keyboards too, so please don't be so quick to assume they made a mistake and/or are Windows users.

LOL, I didn't know there was so much handwringing over 'alt' vs. 'option'. ;-)

I used 'alt' because that was on the special character cheatsheet (for Macs) I found on the web. All my Mac keyboards seem to have both labels on the key, so I never considered which was the real label, and which was carried over from PC-land.

Because if you are searching "correspondence" you may want to search only correspondence records and not for the word correspondence. So, if you tag a correspondence record with "&correspondence" the search will only return the records and not the word correspondence.

Ah, I see. Thanks!

Correct answer.

Using the tools provided by the OS (spotlight comments) only makes sense...it's too bad that isn't part of the default Leopard dialogs. It would be a simple disclosure arrow that allows for tagging or your text description - just like when you 'get info' on a file in Finder. Plop it right below the location or filename selector and you're golden.

Also too bad is that DFX costs so damned much for a single utility.
:(

Default Folder X is worth every last penny IMO.

A good reason for this method is that you can easily use it in apps like iTunes, Address Book, iCal, etcetera, without having to find and tag the original file that contains the info.

Using Spotlight comments is of course fine, and perhaps cleaner as well.

But this is a nice way to be able to quickly add some tags 'inline' while editing the document. Or in other words, there's always more than one way to skin a cat...

Bogus symbol choice. As indicated above the ° is the degree symbol - something some of us use fairly often (especially in science).

The • symbol (as suggested above) is a better choice, and actually a bullet.

…and of course Quicksilver's tagging plugin "gives you the option to prepend a symbol or text to a tag", meaning that you can tell QS what character to use, and it will automatically add it to the start of whatever files you tag with QS.

This is well worth reading:
http://lifehacker.com/software/tags/metadata-as-a-filing-system-169971.php

I'm a big fan of Default Folder X as well.