Chapter 7 goes into advanced file searching, which (I believe) hasn't changed much since Win 3.1. There may be some keyboard shortcuts involved, though.
For one thing, Win7 permits a Search box to be installed on the Start bar. (Some of us with more recent iterations of WinXP had something similar that was labeled "Desktop Search" but actually could be used to search the entire computer.)
When you design a search (no matter what program or what widget is doing the searching), it's important to remember that the computer will search for what you tell it to search for. Unless the program is highly developed, the computer will make a distinction between searching for MCC, searching for McHenry County College, and searching for mchenry county college (and Mc Henry County College, for that matter; take it from a woman whose maiden name was Van Cleave!) We encountered the wildcard asterisk (*) in Chapter 3, and it becomes very useful here. Searching McHenry * would yield McHenry, City of; McHenry City Council; McHenry County College; and just about any permutation of McHenry something or another. The asterisk matches to any combination of characters (or no characters) after that space.
A file has various properties, and the Win7 search engine will match on any of those properties: all or part of a file name, a file type, a tag for a file, or various other file properties that might happen to match that sequence of characters.
Boolean operators allow us to refine the search a bit further. type: htm tells the search engine that we're looking for a hypertext markup document -- probably a copy of a webpage, type: rtf tells it we're looking for a Rich Text format document -- probably something we created on WordPad, although we can choose to use an RTF extension in most word processing systems. AND (or the plus sign) lets us connect two concepts: we can ask McHenry AND type: HTM to find HTM documents with McHenry as part of a property. OR (or the dash) lets us check for either (or both) of two concepts; McHenry OR RTF would find anything with McHenry in a property or RTF in a property (or both). NOT allows us to exclude possibilities: McHenry NOT City would find all files with McHenry as part of any property but will then exclude files with City as part of any property. The greater than (>) and less than (<) sign work as they do in mathematics (so does the equals sign (=) AFAIK) to allow us to ask for files date: < 11/23/2014 or for files size: > 10 MB. AND, OR, NOT all have to be typed in upper case, and only one can be used at a time. The quotation mark sets off an exact match string; "cynthia Heimsoth" would only match files with that exact property, not Cynthia Heimsoth, cynthia heimsoth, CYNTHIA HEIMSOTH or Cynthia heimsoth. (Or cynthiaheimsoth, for that matter.) Speaking of parentheses, they can be used to indicate bits of property that both must be present but not necessarily in the same order; (city McHenry) would match McHenry, city of (but not McHenry, City of!) or city of McHenry (but not City of McHenry). It's all a bit confusing, really!
If you know that you created a particular file after October 10, 2014, but before November 17, 2014, you can search for it by using date: > 10/10/2014 AND < 11/17/2014. (Note that you can't include an OR or a NOT or an additional AND; you'd have to give up one of your date markers to search on any other properties.)
At the end of a search list, there is a panel to "Search again in:". This enables you to narrow your search to the libraries, your homegroup, your computer, the Internet, the contents of a file, or to customize a particular search area. For example you use the Custom search to search in the Documents library because you know the file is a document stored in that library.
Win7 can have natural language searching turned on, a bit more like the searches we're used to doing on search engines. For example, using the natural language search checkbox, college final document would try to find a document containing "college" and "final" somewhere in the properties. To clear the search, click on the x in the right side of the search box (where the magnifying glass usually is). You can close the filter list and turn off natural language searching, then select the search terms out of the saved list in the search box to try searching with natural language turned off (basically, a Boolean search for a file having "college", "search", and "document" among its properties).
Once you have a file list, you can filter files by any of the file list headings; for example, by Type as Application or Screen saver. Unchecking the box for that filter restores the complete list. You can also sort by Date Modified by a date or a date range, or by Today, or Yesterday, or Last Week, or sort by Name alphabetically or select a range of letters (for example I - Z).
Making a folder indexed makes searching faster. In Control Panel, using either Large Icons or Small Icons, select Indexing Options. Click the Modify button to display the Indexed Locations dialog box. Drop down the list of folders on the drive you're looking at (C:/, for example), locate and select the folder you want to index, and click OK. You should see your selected file among the indexed locations. This permits searching within files for words or phrases.
Media files frequently have specialized properties which can be useful in searches. However, they don't discuss this in detail till page WIN447.
If you don't get the results you expect (particularly if no items match your search) you may need to refine your search by changing your keywords, expanding your search to other locations, including hidden and system files in your search, or search based on different parameters altogether.
Some files have tags. This is a convenient way to group files that deal with the same thing; for example, picture files that are landscapes can each be given the tag "landscape" to pull them out from pictures that aren't. Searching tags: landscape then pulls these tagged files out -- but not files tagged Landscape.
If you know who is on the computer as the Author of a file, you can search by the authors property. For example, if I want to find files I created at McHenry Public Library on DL02 (which are credited as authored by DL02), I can search authors: DL02 (but that won't find files I created at MCC or on DL01).
When searching by date, you can search on the date the file was created (datecreated:) or the date it was last modified (datemodified:). You can search by a date, a date range, or one of the defined ranges Yesterday, Earlier this week, Last week, Earlier this month, Earlier this year, or A long time ago.
When searching by file size, you can find files that are smaller than, equal to, or greater than a particular size. To do greater or equal or smaller or equal, you would need to compose an OR search.
To search a non-indexed location, click Search Again In: Custom to pull up the Choose Search Location box. Type your non-indexed location in the 'Or type a location here' box and Add it to the list of selected locations.
Picture files can have properties of Camera make:, Camera model:, Dimensions:, Orientation:, Date taken:, Width:, Height:, Flash mode:, and Rating:. Ratings are generally assigned by the owner of the computer.
Music files can have properties of Bit rate:, Artist:, Year:, Duration:, Album:, Genre:, Lyrics:, Track:, Year:, and Rating:. Again, ratings are generally assigned by the owner of the computer. The properties are not always set, and they can be set in a confusing manner.
Video files may have the properties of both pictures and music (because they have elements of each) as well as Title, Length, Frame width, Frame height, Data rate, Total bit rate and Frame rate. Commercial producers may also flag comments that identify the original producer of the video. The Title property of a video file is not necessarily the same as the file name!
Saved searches save the instructions on how to conduct a particular search. Microsoft provides two saved searches by default: Everywhere and Indexed Locations. You can then create a search in one of these windows and save that search as its own search. Deleting a saved search will delete the instructions, but deleting the results of that search will delete the files themselves -- be careful! Saved searches can be accessed under the Favorites listing of the Navigation pane. The Searches window is accessed by clicking your user name on the Start menu to open your personal folder. Saved searches can be deleted, and links can be deleted from the Favorites list.
There is also a search window at the bottom of the Start menu. Click the See More Results link to expand your search to other locations like the Internet. Property searches can be done at the bottom of the Start Menu, as can Boolean searches. You can remove a folder from the index -- and should, if you no longer need the file to be indexed, since it will slow down indexed searches.
Chapter 7 then reminds us how to delete unneeded folders and how to log off and turn off the computer.
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