Step by step instructions eh?
I'll give it a shot, I'm still relitively new to macs myself, so no promises, lol.
For this little escapade, I've decided to try and find as essay I've done on the industrial revolution.
1) I opened Finder (i have it in coverflow mode - where the document previews come up in a black box and you can scroll through them) and typed revolution into the search bar. This chucked up about 15 documents of all types (i dont have too much stuff on here atm) such as the essay itself, some research I've downloaded, quite a few various word documents, and 'revolution' by the beatles
2)Above the coverflow section (although this works in any of the other Views - such as icons, or a list - that you want) there is a light grey bar, which includes:
Search: This Mac "(your user name)" Contents File Name Save +
At this point, I have 'This Mac' and 'Contents' highlighted.
If you have multiple users on your mac, selected your user name, this narrows down your search field just to your documents, rather than everyones.
'Contents' means that any document that contains your search words is selected (sorry if this sounds slightly patronising, lol, i can't think of any other way to describe it!) But if you do know the file name, select file name, and that should narrow down your search.
3) Hopefully, at this point you should have few enough documents selected that you can easily find what you are looking for, but if not, press the '+' icon in the search bar i mentioned earlier. This brings up another search attribute which you can manipulate to help narrow your search.
The default one it brings up is 'Kind' which, as expected, means the type of document you are looking for.
4) If you click on Kind it'll bring up a drop-down menu with a few of the more commonly used search attributes. If none of these suit your needs, select 'Other...' and you are presented with a more extensive menu. (Once you have found a suitable search attribute, you can tick it's 'In Menu' box to add it to your origional drop-down menu as a handy time saving device.)
Hopefully, after chosing the type of searches you want, you have narrowed down enough to find what you are looking for.
As a last (hopefully) helpful hint, having selected your document, there is a little flow chart at the bottom of the page which shows you what folders your file is in so you can find it faster next time around.
I do hope some of that was helpful, but as I said before, I'm not overly experienced yet, so hardly an expect.
Good Luck! and sorry for the long post! lol