Chapter 8: Managing Files and Folders

Searching for Files and Folders

Even with a well-organized file system, you can occasionally forget where you put a file or even what the file's exact name is. Fortunately, Windows provides the Search Companion Explorer bar to help you. By using Search Companion, you can find a file

• By name or part of a name
• By date created, modified, or last accessed
• By file type
• By size
• By a string of text contained in the file
• By some combination of all the previous points

To start Search Companion, click the Search button on the Windows Explorer toolbar, or select View | Explorer Bar | Search from the menu. Either action causes Search Companion to appear in the Explorer Bar.

Standard vs. Advanced Search Companion

One of the new features in Windows XP is the Search Companion Wizard interface, shown in Figure 8-11. You begin by choosing an answer to the question What Do You Want To Search For? The multiple-choice style is maintained for as long as possible, and different responses lead to different follow-up questions. (This feature makes the interface hard for us to describe in detail.)

Figure 8-11: Search Companion under standard settings, with the dog

This behavior has the advantages and disadvantages of most Wizard interfaces: It's comfortable and nonintimidating for beginners, but it's slow and frustrating for people who know exactly what they want to do--especially people who learned how to use Search under previous versions of Windows. If the designers of the Wizard have anticipated your desires, then you find a convenient button or link that does the job for you. If not, you end up studying the options given, guessing what follow-up options they lead to, and wondering if any of them is close enough to be worthwhile.

Fortunately, clicking the All Files And Folders option produces a window similar to the window in the old version of Search. If you like, you can skip the Wizard interface and make Search Companion go straight to this window when you start it up. In Microsoft's terminology, the Wizard interface is the "standard" version and the old interface is "advanced." If you search for files often enough to develop habits, we recommend switching to the advanced settings because they always put the same choices in the same places. To make this switch, follow these steps:

1. Choose the Change Preferences option in Search Companion. Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the Search Companion pane if you don't see this option.
2. Choose Change Files And Folders Search Behavior.
3. Click the Advanced radio button. (Do not be intimidated; you can change back whenever you want.)
4. Click OK.

If you decide to go back to the standard settings, repeat the previous steps, but click the Standard radio button in step 3.

Under the advanced settings, Search Companion has a dialog-box interface, shown in Figure 8-12. You enter information into the dialog box by typing it into boxes, checking check boxes, or selecting radio buttons. The dialog-box format allows you to see all the search criteria at once, which gives experienced users a satisfying overview, but can instill a where-do-I-start panic in novices.

Figure 8-12: Search Companion under advanced settings, without the dog

Putting Out the Dog Years ago, someone at Microsoft imagined that computers would be more friendly and less intimidating if the software included cute animated characters. The latest offering from Microsoft's cartoon studio is the animated dog in Search Companion. He serves no purpose other than to be cute, use up processing cycles, and take up screen space. Fortunately, the dog is easier to get rid of than some of Microsoft's earlier efforts. (We can't count the number of friends and relatives who have asked us how to get rid of Clippy, the animated paper clip in Microsoft Office.) If you are using the standard Search settings, choose the Turn Off Animated Character option at the bottom of Search Companion's opening screen. Under the advanced settings, choose Change Preferences followed by Without An Animated Screen Character. If you later decide that you can't live without his big eyes and wagging tail, you can bring the pooch back (under either the standard or advanced settings) by choosing Change Preferences followed by With An Animated Screen Character.

Starting a Search

Whether you use the standard or advanced settings in Search Companion, the overall process of searching for files and folders is basically the same. The sections that follow will describe in more detail what happens in step 2, but in general the process works like this:

1. Select Start | Search. Or, in any Explorer window, click the Search button on the toolbar or select View | Explorer Bar | Search from the menu. All of these actions give you an Explorer window with the Search Companion Explorer bar.
2. Use the Explorer bar to describe the files or folders you're looking for. In the standard settings, this part of the process consists largely of answering questions, with a box or two to fill in along the way. In the advanced settings, you fill in the form shown in Figure 8-12.
3. Click Search to start searching for all files or folders that fit the description you've given. The magnifying glass icon moves in circles while the search continues. As matching files and folders are found, they appear in the viewing area. The number of objects found is shown in the Status bar.
4. If you aren't satisfied with the files and folders you found, change the information you entered and search again.

You can use as many different criteria as you want to narrow your search.

When the search is done, the viewing area displays the files or folders that meet your criteria. From this window you can

• Open any of the files or folders listed.
• Copy, cut, move, or drag-and-drop any of the files or folders to the desktop or some other window.
• Sort the files or folders. If you have set the view to Details (the default, if you opened Search from the Start menu), you can sort by Name, Address, Size, and File Type by clicking the corresponding column header.

Searching by Name

The simplest kind of search is when you know the name of the file (or most of its name), but can't remember where it is located.

In the advanced settings, type the name of the file into the All Or Part Of The File Name box of the Search Explorer bar, and then click Search.

In the standard settings, begin by clicking whichever of the links best describes what you are looking for: Pictures Music Or Video; Documents; or All Files And Folders. If you aren't sure, click All Files And Folders. Each choice takes you to a somewhat different set of questions, but all of them have a box in which you can type part or all of the name of the file. Click the Search button to begin.

If you know only part of the name of a file, type that part into Search Companion. When you click Search, the viewing area displays all the files and folders whose names include that text string. (Even if you type in the full name, Search treats it as a substring, and returns all the files and folders whose names contain that text string.) For example, searching for "June" might yield the files june02.doc, Next June.txt, and 99june quarterly report.wks, plus the folders June's Recipes and Juneau Alaska.

If you don't remember much about the name of the file ("It had an A in it somewhere"), the resulting list of files and folders is likely to be daunting. You can make your search more specific by combining it with other criteria, or by using case sensitivity and wildcards, described in the next two sections.

Case Sensitivity

In the preceding "June" example, the search for "June" was not case sensitive--the capital J was not taken into account, which is why june02.doc and 99june quarterly report.wks appeared on the list. If you want your capital letters to be matched only to other capital letters, you need to find the Case Sensitive check box and check it.

Case Sensitive is classified as an Advanced Search Option, so in the standard settings you find it by clicking links that contain the phrase "Advanced Search Options" or "Advanced Options" until the Case Sensitive check box reveals itself. In the advanced settings the process is a little easier to describe:

1. Click the arrows-down button labeled More Advanced Options. The arrows on the button turn up and the Explorer bar expands to include more options.
2. Click the Case Sensitive check box.

Case sensitivity also applies to text searches.

Case sensitivity still wasn't working in late test versions of Windows XP, but we assume Microsoft will get it fixed before shipping the commercial version.

Wildcards

The asterisk (*) and question mark (?) characters play a special role in filename searches. Neither is allowed to be part of a filename, so when you include them in a filename search, Windows knows you intend for it to do something special with them. The asterisk and question mark are called wildcards because (like wildcards in poker) they can stand for any other character.

The question mark stands for any single character, so you can use it when you either don't know or don't want to specify a character in a filename. If, for example, you can't remember whether a file is named Letter to Tim or Letter to Tom, search for Letter to T?m--either Tim or Tom will match T?m. Similarly, you can find both Annual Report 2001 and Annual Report 2002, by using "Annual Report 200?" in your search.

An asterisk stands for any string of characters. Searching for Letter to T*m would not only find Letter to Tim and Letter to Tom, but also Letter to Travel Management Team.

Searching for Text Strings

You can also search for documents that contain certain words or phrases. This makes for a much more time-consuming search than any of the other criteria because Windows has to search the files themselves, rather than just file properties. (If you frequently do text searches, you can speed them up by enabling the Indexing Service described in the next section.) For this reason, you should avoid using this feature if other criteria are already enough to narrow the search. But sometimes a text-string search may be exactly what you need. For example, you could generate a list of all the letters you've written to your mother by searching for the phrase "Dear Mom."

If you are using the advanced settings of Search Companion, you can add a text string to your search, type it into the A Word Or Phrase In The File line. Unfortunately, this technique works for contiguous phrases only. Unlike online search engines, you can't search for a series of keywords, such as "Mom" and "Christmas."

Under the standard settings, you also want to enter the text string into the A Word Or Phrase In The File box, but you need to click an option in order find it. If you begin by selecting the All File Types option, this box appears right away. Otherwise, you need to click the Use Advanced Search Options link to find it.

To make Windows pay attention to the capitalization in your Search, make sure the Case Sensitive box is checked on the Search Explorer bar.

Using Indexing Service

If you have ever searched through a book looking for a particular passage, you know what a difference it makes to have someone do the up-front work of making an index or concordance. That, in a nutshell, is what Indexing Service does: It is a utility that creates and maintains catalog files that keep track of the contents of the files on your computer. Having the Indexing Service enabled makes searches (especially text searches) much faster, at the cost of a certain amount of overhead: Indexing Service requires some time to construct an initial catalog, which it must update from time to time as you create new files and change old ones.

To find out whether Indexing Service is currently enabled or disabled, click the Change Preferences link in the Search Companion Explorer bar. The bar then displays the question How Do You Want To Use Search Companion? Click the response With Indexing Service or Without Indexing Service, whichever is offered. Search Companion then informs you whether Indexing Service is currently enabled or disabled, and offers you the option of enabling it or disabling it.

If you administer a large, complex file system you may find it useful to create separate catalogs for various pieces of the system, so that the users on your system can do faster, better targeted searches. Catalogs are managed from the Indexing Service icon, which is in the Services and Applications section of the Computer Management console, but this topic goes beyond the scope of this book. See the "Using Indexing Service" topic in Windows Help and Support.

Looking in the Right Place

If you know where the desired files or folders are located in the folder tree, search only that portion of the tree. That search doesn't take so long and yields fewer false "finds." The Look In pull-down list provides a number of possible limitations to the search, for example, searching only one particular drive rather than all of them. The Look In pull-down list is immediately visible under the advanced settings of Search Companion and appears when you click the All Files And Folders option in the standard settings. If you choose Documents or Pictures Music Or Video in the standard settings, you need to click Use Advanced Search Options to make Look In appear.

To restrict your search even further, click Browse on the Look In pull-down list and a Browse For Folder window opens. In this window, select a folder to search and click OK; only that folder and its subfolders are searched. Another way to tell Windows where to search is by right-clicking the folder you want to search and choosing Search from the menu that appears.

By default, the Look In box is set to the folder that was open when you pushed the Search toolbar button, or (if you opened Search from the Start menu) your local hard drives.

Searching by Date

If you remember when you last modified a file, you can use that information to help find it. To specify date information in Search Companion, you first need to find the When Was It Modified question. Under the advanced settings, this question appears immediately, but under the standard settings you must click an option before this question appears.

When you have found the When Was It Modified question click the downward-pointing arrow button next to it. You are offered several possible answers to the question, ranging from the past week to the past year, as shown here:

If one of these options describes what you know about the file, click the corresponding radio button. You can also specify a range of dates, if you know when you most recently worked on the file (for example, some time last summer). To do this, click the Specify Dates radio button and use the From and To boxes to specify the beginning and ending dates for your search. The Specify Dates radio button also lets you base your search on the dates when the file was created or most recently accessed. Make this choice from a drop-down list.

When you are done specifying your search, click the Search button.

If all you know about a file is that you accessed it recently, you might do better to look on the History Explorer bar.

Searching by File Type

The first question you are asked under the standard settings of Search Companion is essentially a question about file type. After you choose the Documents or Pictures Music Or Video option, you have no opportunity to be more specific about file type, but in the All Files and Folders option a Type Of File drop-down list appears under More Advanced Options. (In any of the options, you can use the All Or Part Of The File Name box to enter a file extension, such as .doc for Word files.)

Under the advanced settings, click the More Advanced Options button and then choose from the Type Of File drop-down list.

Searching by Size

If you know the file you're looking for is several megabytes, don't waste time searching all those 50K files or vice versa. You can search large files only or small files only, but you can't search between two sizes. To specify a file size under the advanced settings, click the What Size Is It question. A set of radio buttons appears describing small, medium, or large files, as shown here:

Or, you can click the Specify Size radio button, choose At Least or At Most from a drop-down list, and then enter a number into the KB box to specify a limiting size in kilobytes.

Under the standard settings of Search Companion, the What Size Is It? question doesn't appear right away. You can find it right away by clicking the All Files And Folders option, or you can click the Documents or Pictures/Music/Video option and then click Use Advanced Search Options.

Saving and Retrieving a Search

After performing a search, you can save the search parameters by selecting File | Save Search. The list of files found with that search is not saved. The parameters are saved in a Saved Search file (with extension .fnd). To perform the search in the future, open the Saved Search file and click the Search Now button. Once a search has been saved, you can even share it with other people in the same ways you would share any other file--by copying it to a floppy, or attaching it to e-mail. Another way to re-run a search is by double-clicking its .fnd file (which is usually stored in your My Documents folder, unless you specified another location).