Published: April 18, 2009 11:55 pm      

Technically Yours — painless searching

While I was downtown today I picked up a mint, ate it, and then felt a strange pain in my mouth. It seems that a red ant had first dibs on that mint and ended up in my mouth. Neither of us were keen on that idea and the ant bit the inside of my mouth to let me know. That’s a first for me. I found it quickly and removed it. We were both much happier.

Finding documents , like ants in your mouth, can be painful. I receive many calls from customers who fear they have lost a document forever only to find that it was simply saved in a location they couldn’t remember or didn’t expect.

Being more organized helps, but even for the truly organized, finding a document or a group of documents can be difficult. For example, if you wanted to find all photos taken during Spring Break, how would you do that? How about finding all documents that contained the phrase “Red Badge of Courage” or all find e-mails from “Greg Bott” with “Twitter” in the subject line?

There is an application and method to find all lost documents, files, folders, e-mails, contacts, and appointments. For Windows XP owners, this is called Windows Search (not to be confused with Microsoft’s Live Search, which searches the Internet). Google offers a competing product, Google Desktop, but in my experience it slows computer performance more than Windows Search and it offers fewer features.

Windows Search 4.0 is already included in Windows Vista and can be downloaded for Windows XP (search for “download windows search” in your favorite search engine). For Vista owners, access Windows Search by clicking Start and typing in Start Search. In XP, Windows Search adds a taskbar toolbar in which you can type search text.

Technical warning: what I am about to write might be intimidating, but don’t quit. Try some of these searches, they’re easier than they seem and will greatly benefit your computing life.

To find all Microsoft Word documents, type “filename:*.doc” (without quotes) and press ENTER. The asterisk (*) means find every document that has anything preceding the period and “doc” and the “.doc” means only documents that have “.doc” at the end of the filename will be displayed.

Subject:job AND from:Larry will display all items with a subject that have the word “job” in it and that has “Larry” in the From address.

If you add Lockheed to your search, subject:job AND from:Larry AND Lockheed, Windows Search will display all items with a subject that contains the word “job” and that are from “Larry” (any name with Larry in it—Larry Bird, Larry King, etc.) and that has “Lockheed” somewhere in the document.

Vista enables you to save a search term as a virtual folder. For example, you can have a folder titled “Word docs this week” which displays all the word docs you’ve worked on in the past week. To create it, click Start, and in the Start Search box, type “*.doc AND date:this week” (without quotes) and press Enter. In an instant all the Word documents you’ve created or modified in the past week (including e-mail attachments) will be displayed in the search Window. In that window, click Save Search and name the folder. Now you have a folder with nothing in it, but that will instantly find and display all Word documents created or modified in the past week. It’s amazing and much less painful than eating an ant.



Bott Technology Solutions helps small to midsize businesses with computer technology needs and may be reached via e-mail at gregbott@bottinc.com or at 601-616-8509. Greg’s professional experience includes consulting for Price Waterhouse’s Strategic

Consulting Group, working as a Program Manager for Microsoft Corporation, and serving as Chief Technology Officer for several companies. He has a Master of Science in Software Engineering degree from the University of Texas and has presented at

technical conferences across the world. He has published over a dozen works including the Microsoft Press Windows Server 2003 Network Infrastructure

textbook, Customizing SharePoint, and the Microsoft ASP.Net Security Operations Guide.