LeeTutor's Doing Windows
Windows Tips Categories
Start Menu Tips
WHAT YOU CAN DO WITH WINDOWS FIND
Most Windows 95 (and 98) users know that there is an
option called Find on the Start Menu. This same Find
feature is also available on the Tools Menu of Windows
Explorer and My Computer. After you start up the Find
program in one of these ways, you can search for folders,
files (whether program executable files or data files of
various sorts), or even the contents of files. You first
specify where you want to look, by inputting the contents
of the "Look in:" field. This might be your
entire computer, your hard drive(s), your floppy
drive(s), your CD-ROM drive, a certain folder or group of
folders. The little downward-pointing triangle to the
right of this field will give you a menu of some of the
possible contents of this field when you click on it. If
you're looking for a certain file or folder name, or part
of it, you specify that in the field labelled
"Named:". If you are searching for text
contents of a file or group of files, this is input in
the field labelled "Containing Text:".
If you aren't sure what folders to specify in the
"Look in:" field, but you think it may be
recognizable if you browse the list of folders on your
machine, you click on the "Browse" button. If
you do specify a path to search of some sort and want to
include subfolders in that path, you make sure that the
"Include subfolders" check box is clicked
"on" (it has a check mark in it.) If you know
the file was modified, created, or last accessed within a
certain period of time, it is possible to specify that on
the "Date" tab of this dialog box.
Finally, on the "Advanced" tab, there is a menu
of a great many types of files -- such as GIF image, Text
file, Shortcut, Quicktime movie, help file -- that are
defined according to the file extension in the file name
(this is the last 3 letters, following the period in the
name; e.g., "txt" in "readme.txt".)
You can limit the search to any one of these numerous
file types. On this same "Advanced" tab you can
also limit the size of the file to be at least or at most
a certain number of kilobytes long. On the Options menu
of the dialog box, you can specify whether the search is
Case Sensitive (the default is not.)
Once you've specified all the parameters for the search,
you then click on the "Find Now" button, and a
list of the successful matches, if any, will be shown at
the bottom of the dialog box. This results list can be
sorted in ascending or descending order on any of the
fields in the list: file name, folder name, date, size,
and file type. If your search wasn't successful, you can
change any of the ways you specified it while keeping the
rest of the parameters the same, and then do another
search.
If you've successfully found a certain file or folder,
all you have to do is click on it in the results list and
next click on the File menu and then on "Open
Container Folder" in this menu in order to open up
the folder containing your found item. Or, from this same
File menu, you can choose to create a shortcut to it,
delete it, rename it, or go to its property sheet.
If you want to save the search criteria for later reuse,
you can do this by choosing "Save Search" on
the File menu. The search criteria will be saved to your
desktop as an icon.