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Searching (part 2) - Searching As You Type

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10/24/2011 11:10:36 AM

Searching As You Type

You can search for files, folders, movies, and even URLs as you type in the Computer or Windows Explorer window as well as in the Start menu. You do this by typing characters in the Search box; Windows displays the matching results in the Search box.

Tip

When you type characters in the Search box, you can refine your search by prefacing the search characters with the object criteria name in which you want to search, followed by a colon and then your search criteria. For example, if you want to find a file with a name that starts with b, type filename:b in the Search box. This searches for all files with a name starting with the letter b. Other object criteria names include date and type. You can also use filters, which you’ll learn about shortly, to accomplish similar tasks.


Searching in Computer or Windows Explorer

Start searching by typing a character in the Search box. After you type the character, Windows automatically searches for items in the current location that match your criteria (see Figure 4). As you type more characters in the Search box, Windows 7 refines the search and culls the list of matches until you find the one match you need—or at least narrows it down to only a few matches so you can find the file you need quickly.

Figure 4. The list of search results in Windows Explorer.

You can also refine searches using the Add a Search Filter pane that appears under the Search box when you click in or type in the Search box. (You have to be quick; this tiny window displays for only about five seconds at a time.) Available filters change depending on the library or folder selected in Windows Explorer or the Computer window. For example, with the Music library selected, you can select Album, Artists, Genre, and Length filters. Filter options for the Libraries library include

  • Kind— The Kind filter includes types of objects, such as calendar, communication, document, email, game, recorded TV, saved search, and many more.

  • Date Modified— Selecting Date Modified opens a pop-up calendar in which you can select a specific date or a range of dates, or select less-defined date ranges such as A Long Time Ago or Earlier This Year.

  • Type— The Type filter lists some common file types to search for, such as MP3, MVW, and text document.

  • Name— The Name filter lets you enter one or more letters of a file or folder name.

Can’t Find a Program

If you cannot find programs using the Search box in Windows Explorer, use the Start menu Search box instead. Begin typing Programs, and a list of matches will appear above the Search box. Just click the link for Programs and Features. You could also open Control Panel and click Programs and Features directly.


If you know the group where your wayward file resides, you can click one of these filters, and then type your search criteria in the Search box or select it from a pop-up menu. An example of using the Kind filter is shown in Figure 5.

Figure 5. Using the Kind filter.

If the search doesn’t find any files, folders, or other objects that meet your search criteria, the Content pane in the Computer or Windows Explorer window states, “No items match your search.” You can click one of the icons listed under Search Again In to change the location being searched. Or you’ll need to erase one or more characters in the Search box, or erase all the characters in the Search box and start over.

Note

When searching in the Computer window, a message bar might appear, prompting you to add C:\ or another drive to the index. When you click the bar, a shortcut menu appears with Add to Index and Modify Index Locations options.


If you want to save the results of your search, click the Save Search button in the toolbar. Windows 7 asks you to name your search before you save it, and after you save the search file the file appears at the bottom of the Favorites list.

Can’t Find a File

If after much trying you still can’t find the folder or file you’re looking for, the problem could be that your search might only be looking at indexed locations—and indexed locations aren’t all the locations on your computer. Consider using the Indexing Options window to rebuild your index and include your entire C: drive.


Searching in the Start Menu

If you want to perform a faster search to see what’s on your computer that matches your search criteria, or zero in on programs, you can type search criteria in the Search box at the bottom of the Start menu.

As with typing in the Search box in Computer or Windows Explorer, type one character in the Search box and you will see the results as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. The results in the Start menu.


You can open an item in the results list, whether it’s a program, multimedia file, picture, document, or other file type, by clicking its link. If your search turns up no matches, the Start menu states, “No items match your search.”

Tip

In the Start menu, you can see all results from the Start menu search by clicking the See More Results link at the bottom of the search list. If you have not installed another desktop search engine, this launches your search results in a search window called the Search Explorer, which is essentially Windows Explorer with search-related menu items. If you have changed the default search tool, such as to Google Desktop Search, you’ll see a Search Everywhere link rather than a Search More Results link, and the results will appear in that search tool’s interface.


Can’t Find Files That Belong to Other Users

If your search results aren’t returning files that belong to other users on you computer, you should know that Windows 7 only searches your own files to index by default. However, you can add another user’s files to your search results by opening the folder that contains the user’s files. This is usually in the form of C:\Users\User, where User is the name of the person on your system with the files. (You may need to type the administrator password to get access to these files.) After this folder is open, perform your search, and the files in the directory are included in the search.


Grouping and Stacking

Windows 7 not only comes with more powerful searching tools but more powerful organizational tools as well for sorting and filtering files.

In Details view in Computer or Windows Explorer, the top of the Content pane that displays files in your search results list includes column headings that double as filter controls, enabling you to filter the files in the Content pane. When you hover the mouse pointer over a column heading, a down-arrow button appears on the right. Just click the arrow button to display filter information in a small window underneath the button. Figure 7 shows an example.

Figure 7. The window for filtering files by a specific date.

The filter criteria are available when searching or when simply browsing libraries or folders, and they change depending on the location you’re in. Some of the criteria you can sort by include

  • Name, in three different categories (A–H, I–P, and Q–Z)

  • Date modified, which lets you filter by a specific date you can select from a calendar, as shown in Figure 7

  • Type, which may include the ability to filter by compressed folders, file folders, documents, images, registration entries, and so on

  • Size, which lets you display objects by categories of size, such as Medium (100 KB–1 MB), Large (1–16 MB), Huge (16–128 MB), or Unspecified

Additional criteria may include folder path, contributing artists, album, title, tags, rating, and many more, all with subcriteria that let you focus on specific information you want to see.

To view your files in a stacked arrangement, such as pictures taken in a certain month, right-click on a blank area of the Content pane, select Arrange By, and then select Month. Windows 7 takes all these pictures and combines them into stacks based on month, as shown in Figure 8.

Figure 8. Stacked files organized by months.

Stacked files behave like folders, so you can open up the stacked file and see what’s inside. So what’s the big deal? Stacks are a quick way to collect content that meets your criteria and put them all in one place. And stacks have no physical location on your computer, so they don’t take up space on your computer as a folder does—stacks are just another representation of your content based on your filter criteria.

Windows 7 also allows you to group files by the criteria listed by the filter. Just right-click on a blank area of the Content pane, select Group By from the shortcut menu, and select a group criterion. For example, if you group files by name, Computer or Windows Explorer will group all the files by filename starting with the A–H group at the top, followed by the I–P group, and ending with the Q–Z group at the bottom. The grouping filter allows you to get a more granular view of which files belong to a particular group.

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