How do I sort all my files in size order?

Why does Apple create these restrictions?

Apple has, well, since pretty much forever, set up the Mac OS's default behavior to be the simplest, least likely way to get yourself in trouble as possible. Aimed mostly at folks who are new to computers. The default is still what used to be called "Simple Finder". No drive icons showing, less used menu choices hidden, etc. Though the later is now chosen when you create an account where you want that user to have less overall access.

That carries though to the Find function. It won't show you anything in the System or root Library folders, or any hidden folders unless you add the choices to include those areas of the drive.

Spotlight is great if you are a writer, researcher or such and routinely need to find text within your documents. I look for files and folders, so EasyFind is much better suited to that task. It's not as fast as Spotlight since it's a brute search type of app that has to read the file tables of each drive and collect their paths for display, whereas Spotlight grabs everything it needs from the indexes it creates.

It did realize why Find wouldn't show me a large number of Word documents I expected to see. I have all but one drive set as Private in the Spotlight preferences. If Outlook didn't require Spotlight to be active in order to return searches within itself to find emails, I'd have Spotlight disabled on my entire Mac.

You can tell EasyFind to search by location. Go over to the top right and change the drop down menu to Select, or press Command+L. Then choose the folder you want to confine the search to, such as your user account, or the Documents folder within that. Whatever you select, it will automatically search all nested folders from that location inward.

To confine your search, you would do this for Word documents:

Since .docx is a derivative of .doc, there's no need to enter both as a search phrase. Only files with .doc as part of their name will be listed. You can then of course sort by size to find the largest, and then by name to have duplicates appear right next to each other.

I propose to delete large files that are in the root of the Downloads folder. This is on the basis that if of any importance they will have been saved elsewhere.

Since the Downloads folder is just that, files you have downloaded, they don't belong to the OS in any way. Backup what you want to, or need to save and then empty the folder.

Do you think there is any risk that this would delete important Application files that did not exist anywhere else?

Be very careful with those types of decisions, or you may end up having to reinstall the OS, or restoring a backup. One example is Automator. While you may never use it yourself, many OS apps and the OS itself use it to perform certain functions in the background. So don't delete that one for sure. Many others aren't the slightest bit important, even though the OS insists you can't remove them. Like Chess, Stickies, PhotoBooth, and quite a few others.

Apple's Find function is about the most useless thing I've ever seen. Very difficult to get it to show the drive you want, or even to show you all matching items. I put .doc as a search for File > Contains, and it returned one, count 'em, one match for This Mac, which should have returned at least a couple hundred.

Use the free EasyFind instead. Here, I searched for .doc , files only on a selected volume, then clicked the size column to sort largest at the top. The window is live, so you can delete duplicates or items you no longer want from the interface.

Press Command+2 to put the folder into List view. Then click the Size column name at the top.

You're welcome. 🙂