Comment 43 for bug 646724

Sorry to chime in since it sounds like you guys have got this thing figured out; I just commented on bug #773204, which is probably the same issue (after trying to answer somebody on Ask Ubuntu who wanted to know how to reproduce the functionality in classic gnome of using Alt+F2 + path-to-file to open a document). The discussion above seems to confirm my guess that the dash only sees recent documents. (Which, as you've also already noticed, is annoying if you've ported your old files to a clean install.) So I guess the right answer for the Ask Ubuntu guy is, 'use the Super key, but it's not 100% there yet'? (BTW, Alt+F2 no longer works for this purpose.)