Windows 7: The Missing Manual

••The dialog-box way. In the Properties dialog box for the taskbar (right-click it; choose Properties from the shortcut menu), an option called “Use small icons” appears. As described in the box on page 105, it cuts those inch-tall taskbar icons down to half size, for a more pre-Win7 look.Moving the Taskbar to the Sides of the ScreenYet another approach to getting the taskbar out of your way is to rotate it so that itsits vertically against a side of your screen. You can rotate it in either of two ways: ••The draggy way. First, ensure that the toolbar isn’t locked, as described above. (Right-click a blank spot; from the shortcut menu, uncheck “Lock the taskbar.”) Now you can drag the taskbar to any edge of the screen, using any blank spot in the central section as a handle. (You can even drag it to the top of your screen, if you’re a true rebel.) Release the mouse when the taskbar leaps to the edge you’ve indicated with the cursor.Tip: No matter which edge of the screen holds your taskbar, your programs are generally smart enough toadjust their own windows as necessary. In other words, your Word document will shift sideways so that itdoesn’t overlap the taskbar you’ve dragged to the side of the screen. ••The dialog-box way. Right-click a blank spot on the taskbar; from the shortcut menu, choose Properties. Use the “Taskbar location on screen” pop-up menu to choose Left, Right, Top, or Bottom. (You can do this even if the taskbar is locked.)You’ll probably find that the right side of your screen works better than the left. Mostprograms put their document windows against the left edge of the screen, where thetaskbar and its labels might get in the way.Note: When you position your taskbar vertically, what was once the right side of the taskbar becomes thebottom. In other words, the Clock appears at the bottom of the vertical taskbar. So as you read referencesto the taskbar in this book, mentally substitute the phrase “bottom part of the taskbar” when you read refer-ences to the “right side of the taskbar.”Taskbar ToolbarsAll VersionsYou’d be forgiven if you’ve never even heard of taskbar toolbars; this is one obscurefeature.These toolbars are separate horizontal sections on the taskbar that offer special-function features. You can even build your own toolbars—for example, one stockedwith documents related to a single project. (Somewhere in America, there’s a self-helpgroup for people who spend entirely too much time fiddling with this kind of thing.)

To make a toolbar appear or disappear, right-click a blank spot on the taskbar andchoose from the Toolbars submenu that appears (Figure 2-35). The ones with check-marks are the ones you’re seeing now; you can click to turn them on and off.Tip: You can’t adjust the toolbars’ widths until you unlock the taskbar (right-click a blank spot and turn off“Lock the taskbar”). Now each toolbar is separated from the main taskbar by a dotted “grip strip.” Drag thisstrip to make the toolbar wider or narrower. Figure 2-35: Top: Make toolbars appear by right- clicking a blank area on the taskbar, if you can find one. Bottom: Toolbars eat into your taskbar space, so use them sparingly. If you’ve added too many icons to the toolbar, a h button appears at its right end. Click it to expose a list of the commands or icons that didn’t fit.Here’s a rundown of the ready-made taskbar toolbars at your disposal.Address ToolbarThis toolbar offers a duplicate copy of the address bar that appears in every Explorerwindow, complete with a Recent Addresses pop-up menu—except that it’s alwaysavailable, even if no Explorer window happens to be open.Links ToolbarFrom its name alone, you might assume that the purpose of this toolbar is to providelinks to your favorite Web sites. And sure enough, that’s one thing it’s good for.

But in fact, you can drag any icon at all onto this toolbar—files, folders, disks, pro-grams, or whatever—to turn them into one-click buttons.In other words, the Links toolbar duplicates the “park favorite icons” function ofthe Start menu, taskbar, and Quick Launch toolbar. But in some ways, it’s better. Itcan display any kind of icon (unlike the taskbar). It’s always visible (unlike the Startmenu). And it shows the icons’ names.Note: The Links toolbar is a mirror of the Favorites toolbar in Internet Explorer (ToolsÆToolbarsÆFavorites),just in case you were baffled. Edit one, you edit the other.Here are a few possibilities of things to stash here, just to get your juices flowing: ••Install icons of the three or four programs you use the most (or a few documents you work on every day). •• Install the Recycle Bin’s icon, so you don’t have to mouse all the way over to… wherever you keep the real Recycle Bin. ••Install icons for shared folders on the network. This arrangement saves several steps when you want to connect to them. ••Install icons of Web sites you visit often so you can jump directly to them when you sit down in front of your PC each morning. (In Internet Explorer, you can drag the tiny icon at the left end of the address bar directly onto the Links toolbar to install a Web page there.)You can drag these links around on the toolbar to put them into a different order, orremove a link by dragging it away—directly into the Recycle Bin, if you like. (They’reonly shortcuts; you’re not actually deleting anything important.) To rename somethinghere—a good idea, since horizontal space in this location is so precious—right-clickit and choose Rename from the shortcut menu.Tip: Dragging a Web link from the Links toolbar to the desktop or an Explorer window creates an Internetshortcut file. When double-clicked, this special document connects to the Internet and opens the specifiedWeb page.Tablet PC Input PanelThis toolbar is useful only if you’re working on a tablet PC, which has a touch screenand stylus. It provides quick access to Windows’s handwriting-recognition software.Chapter 19 has the details.Desktop ToolbarThe Desktop toolbar (Figure 2-35, bottom) offers quick access to whichever iconsare sitting on your desktop—the Recycle Bin, for example, and whatever else you’veput there. As a convenience, it also lists a few frequently used places that aren’t onthe desktop, including your Personal folder, your libraries, Homegroup, Network,Control Panel, and so on.

When it first appears, the Desktop toolbar takes the form of a >> button at the rightend of the taskbar. You can widen the Desktop toolbar if you like, making its buttonsappear horizontally on the taskbar. But if you leave it compressed, then many of itsicons sprout pop-up submenus that give you direct access to their contents. That’s auseful way to get at your stuff when your screen is filled with windows.Redesigning Your ToolbarsTo change the look of a toolbar, first unlock it. (Right-click it; from the shortcut menu,choose “Lock the taskbar,” if necessary, so that the checkmark disappears. Later, repeatthis procedure to lock the taskbar again.)Next, right-click any blank spot on the toolbar. The resulting shortcut menu offersthese choices, which appear above the usual taskbar shortcut menu choices:nostalgia cornerBringing Back the Quick Launch ToolbarThe whole point of the old Quick Launch toolbar was to can drag anything onto it for easy access: folder, file, disk,display the icons of programs you used a lot—exactly like the shortcut, program…anything with an icon.new Windows 7 taskbar itself. So Microsoft took the QuickLaunch toolbar out behind the barn and shot it. It still doesn’t look much like the old Quick Launch toolbar, though. But you can fix that.Besides, if “a toolbar filled with icons of my choosing, readyfor one-click opening” is the idea behind the Quick Launch First, unlock the taskbar. (Right-click it; from the shortcuttoolbar, why not use the Links toolbar or the “build your menu, choose “Lock the taskbar,” if necessary, so that theown” toolbar described on these pages? checkmark disappears.)Well, all right. If you really feel it’s that important to have the Now right-click the Quick Launch toolbar itself; turn offQuick Launch toolbar—the Show Title and Show Text.actual, original one—you can Drag the dotted “grip strip”bring it back. handle at the toolbar’s left edge all the way to the leftStart by creating a folder so that it’s right next to thethat contains the icons for Start menu, where the oldeverything you want displayed on the toolbar. Quick Launch toolbar used to be. Drag the right-side “gripNow right-click a blank spot on the taskbar. From the shortcut strip” to adjust the width. Relock the taskbar, if you like.menu, choose ToolbarsÆNew Toolbar. In the resultingdialog box, type this (AutoComplete is there to help you From now on, you can install any file, folder, or disk ontosave typing)… this toolbar just by dragging it there. It shows up, tiny but legible, ready for opening with one click.%appdata%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch If you change your mind, you can get rid of the Quick Launch toolbar. Right-click the taskbar; from the shortcut…and then click Select Folder. menu, choose ToolbarsÆQuick Launch toolbar, so that the checkmark disappears.And presto: The Quick Launch toolbar now appears on yourtaskbar. It works exactly like the Links toolbar, in that you118 windows 7: the missing manual

••View lets you change the size of the icons on the toolbar. ••Open Folder works only with the Quick Launch and Links toolbars. It turns out that the icons on these toolbars reflect the contents of corresponding folders on your PC. To see one, right-click a blank spot on the toolbar itself; from the shortcut menu, choose Open Folder. Why is that useful? Because it means you can add, rename, or delete icons en masse, by working in the folder instead of on the toolbar itself. Of course, you can also delete or rename any icon on these toolbars by right-clicking it and choosing Delete or Rename from the shortcut menu. But a window isn’t nearly as claustrophobic as the toolbar itself. ••Show Text identifies each toolbar icon with a text label. ••Show Title makes the toolbar’s name (such as “Quick Launch” or “Desktop”) ap- pear on the toolbar. ••Close Toolbar makes the toolbar disappear.Tip: How much horizontal taskbar space a toolbar consumes is up to you. Drag the border at the left edgeof a toolbar to make it wider or narrower. That’s a good point to remember if, in fact, you can’t find a blankspot to right-click on. (Sub-Tip: In a pinch, you can right-click the clock.) Don’t forget that you have to unlockthe toolbar before you can change its size (right-click, and then choose “Lock the taskbar” so the checkmarkdisappears). Figure 2-36: To create a new toolbar, begin by making a folder. Stock it with the icons you want to access from the taskbar. Amaze your friends!

Build Your Own Toolbars The Quick Launch and Links toolbars are such a delight that you may find that having only one isn’t enough. You may wish to create several different Links toolbars, each stocked with the icons for a different project or person. One could contain icons for all the chapters of a book you’re writing; another could list only your games. Fortunately, it’s easy to create as many different custom toolbars as you like, each of which behaves exactly like the Links toolbar. Windows creates toolbars from folders; so before creating a toolbar of your own, you must create a folder and fill it with the stuff you want to toolbar-ize. Next, right-click a blank spot on the taskbar. From the shortcut menu, choose Tool- barsÆNew Toolbar to open the New Toolbar dialog box, as shown in Figure 2-36. Find and click the folder you want, and then click Select Folder. Now there’s a brand-new toolbar on your taskbar, whose buttons list the contents of the folder you selected. Feel free to tailor it as described—by changing its icon sizes, hiding or showing the icon labels, or installing new icons onto it by dragging them from other Explorer windows.120 windows 7: the missing manual

3chapterSearching & OrganizingYour FilesEvery disk, folder, file, application, printer, and networked computer is repre- sented on your screen by an icon. To avoid spraying your screen with thousands of overlapping icons seething like snakes in a pit, Windows organizes icons intofolders, puts those folders into other folders, and so on. This folder-in-a-folder-in-a-folder scheme works beautifully at reducing screen clutter, but it means that you’vegot some hunting to do whenever you want to open a particular icon.Helping you find, navigate, and manage your files, folders, and disks with less stressand greater speed was one of the primary design goals of Windows 7—and of thischapter. The following pages cover Search, plus icon-management life skills likeselecting them, renaming them, moving them, copying them, making shortcuts ofthem, assigning them to keystrokes, deleting them, and burning them to CD or DVD.Tip: To create a new folder to hold your icons, right-click where you want the folder to appear (on thedesktop or in any desktop window except Computer), and choose NewÆFolder from the shortcut menu.The new folder appears with its temporary “New Folder” name highlighted. Type a new name for the folderand then press Enter.Meet Windows SearchAll VersionsEvery computer offers a way to find files. And every system offers several differentways to open them. But Search combines these two functions in a way that’s so fast,so efficient, and so spectacular, it reduces much of what you’ve read in the previouschapters to irrelevance. It works like Google Desktop (or Spotlight on the Macintosh),in that it finds files as you type what you’re looking for—not like Windows XP, which

doesn’t start searching until you’re finished typing and takes a very long time to find things at that. It’s important to note, though, that you can search for files on your PC using the superfast Search box in two different places: ••The Start menu. The Start Search box at the bottom of the Start menu searches everywhere on your computer. ••Explorer windows. The Search box at the top of every desktop window searches only that window (including folders within it). You can expand it, too, into some- thing called the Search pane—a way to limit the scope of your search to certain file types or date ranges, for example. Search boxes also appear in the Control Panel window, Internet Explorer, Windows Mail, Windows Media Player, and other spots where it’s useful to perform small-time, limited searches. The following pages, however, cover the two main Search boxes, the ones that hunt down files and folders. Search from the Start Menu All Versions Start by opening the Start menu, either by using the mouse or by pressing the w key. The “Search programs and files” box appears at the bottom of the Start menu; you can immediately begin typing to identify what you want to find and open (Figure 3-1). For example, if you’re trying to find a file called “Pokémon Fantasy League.doc,” typing just pok or leag will probably work. Capitalization doesn’t count, and neither do accent marks; typing cafe finds files with the word “café” just fine. (You can change this, however; see page 136.) As you type, the familiar Start menu items are replaced by search results (Figure 3-1). This is a live, interactive search; that is, Windows modifies the menu as you type—you do not have to press Enter after entering your search phrase. The results menu lists every file, folder, program, email message, address book entry, calendar appointment, picture, movie, PDF document, music file, Web bookmark, and Microsoft Office document (Word, PowerPoint, and Excel) that contains what you typed, regardless of its name or folder location. up to speed Directories vs. Folders Before Windows took over the universe, folders were called ries. Keep that in mind the next time you’re reading an old directories, and folders inside them were called subdirecto- user guide, magazine article, or computer book.122 windows 7: the missing manual

Windows isn’t just searching icon names. It’s also searching their contents—thewords inside your documents—as well as all your files’ metadata. (That’s descriptivetext information about what’s in a file, like its height, width, size, creator, copyrightholder, title, editor, created date, and last modification date. Page 86 has the details.)Note: Windows is constantly updating its invisible index (page 132) in real time. You can prove it to yourselflike this: Open a text document (in WordPad, for example). Type an unusual word, like wombat. Save thedocument using a different name—say, “Fun Pets.” Now immediately do a search. Hit the w key and typewom, for example. You’ll see that Windows finds “Fun Pets” even though it’s only moments old. That’s afar cry from, for example, the old Windows Indexing Service, which updated its index only once a day, inthe middle of the night! Figure 3-1: Press w, or click the Start-menu icon, to see the Search box. As you type, Win- dows builds the list of every match it can find, neatly arranged in categories: Pro- grams, Documents, and so on. You don’t have to type an entire word. Typing kumq will find documents containing the word “kumquat.” However, it’s worth noting that Windows recognizes only the beginnings of words. Typing umquat won’t find a document containing—or even named—“Kumquat.” Press the , or . keys keys to walk through the list one item at a time.If you see the icon you were hoping to dig up, double-click it to open it. Or use thearrow keys to “walk down” the menu, and then press Enter to open it.

If you choose a program (programs are listed first in the results menu), well, thatprogram pops onto the screen. Selecting an email message opens that message inyour email program. And so on.As you’ll soon learn, Search threatens to make all that folders-in-folders business nearlypointless. Why burrow around in folders when you can open any file or program witha couple of keystrokes?The “More Results” WindowWindows’s menu shows you only about 15 results. Unless you own one of thoseextremely rare 60-inch Skyscraper Displays, there just isn’t room to show you thewhole list.Instead, Windows uses some fancy behind-the-scenes analysis to calculate and dis-play the 15 or so most likely matches for what you typed. They appear grouped intocategories like Programs, Pictures, Control Panel, and Documents. The number inparentheses shows how many items are in each category.Tip: If you click one of these category headings, you open a window containing just the search results inthat category. Kind of handy, really.Having such a short list of likely suspects means it’s easy to arrow-key your way tothe menu item you want to open. But at the bottom of the menu, a link called “Seemore results” is a reminder that there may be many other candidates. Click it to openthe results window, shown in Figure 3-2. Figure 3-2: You can open this window by clicking a link called “See more results” in the Start menu’s results list. “More,” in this case, means “every­thing Windows found except programs and Control Panel items.”Now you have access to the complete list of matches, listed in typical Explorer-windowformat, using the new Content view (so that you can read the first few lines of text ineach file, for example). As a bonus, the text that matches your search query is high-lighted in each file’s name, also shown in Figure 3-2. You can sort this list, group it,or filter it exactly as described in Chapter 2.

The only difference is that the task toolbar (Organize, Views, and so on) offers a but-ton that doesn’t usually adorn standard folder windows, called “Save search.” Detailson this item later in this chapter.This Search Results window offers a suite of additional tools for continuing yourquest. For example, if you choose OrganizeÆLayoutÆPreview pane, you open theright-hand Preview panel. It shows you the contents of each icon you click in the list(a picture, a playable movie or sound, the text in a Word file, and so on), which canbe a great help in trying to figure out what these things are.You can also click one of the “Search again in:” icons at the bottom of the results list.They represent specialized places where you can repeat the same search: just in yourlibraries, on the Internet, across your homegroup (page 775), or whatever. If you wantto repeat the search in a particular folder or disk, click Custom to specify it.Limit by Size, Date, Rating, Tag, Author…Suppose you’re looking for a file called Big Deals.doc. But when you type big into theSearch box, you wind up wading through hundreds of files that contain the word “big.”It’s at times like these that you’ll be grateful for Windows’s little-known criterionsearches. These are syntax tricks that help you create narrower, more targeted searches.All you have to do is prefix your search query with the criterion you want, followedby a colon.One example is worth a thousand words, so several examples should save an awfullot of paper: ••name: big finds only documents with “big” in their names. Windows ignores any- thing with that term inside the file. ••tag: crisis finds only icons with “crisis” as a tag—not as part of the title or contents. ••created: 7/25/10 finds everything you wrote on July 25, 2010. You can also use modified: today or modified: yesterday, for that matter. Or don’t be that specific. Just use modified: July or modified: 2010. You can use symbols like < and >, too. To find files created since yesterday, you could type created: >yesterday. Or use two dots to indicate a range. To find all the email you got in the first two weeks of March 2010, you could type received: 3/1/2010..3/15/2010. (That two-dot business also works to specify a range of file sizes, as in size: 2 MB..5 MB.)Tip: That’s right: Windows recognizes human terms like today, yesterday, this week, last week, last month,this month, and last year. ••size: >2gb finds all the big files on your PC. ••rating: <*** finds documents to which you’ve given ratings of three stars or fewer. ••camera model: Nikon D90 finds all the pictures you took with that camera.

••kind: email finds all the email messages. That’s just one example of the power of kind. Here are some other kinds you can look for: calendar, appointment, or meeting (appointments in Outlook, or iCal or vCalendar files); communication (email and attachments); contact or person (vCard and Windows Contact files, Outlook contacts); doc or document (text, Office, PDF, and Web files); folder (folders, .zip files, .cab files); link (shortcut files); music or song (audio files, Windows Media playlists); pic or picture (graphics files like JPEG, PNG, GIF, and BMP); program (programs); tv (shows recorded by Windows Media Center); and video (movie files). ••The folder: prefix limits the search to a certain folder or library. (The starter words under:, in:, and path: work the same way.) So folder: music confines the search to your Music library, and a search for in: documents turtle finds all files in your Documents library containing the word “turtle.”Tip: You can combine multiple criteria searches, too. For example, if you’re pretty sure you had a documentcalled “Naked Mole-Rats” that you worked on yesterday, you could cut directly to it by typing mole modified:yesterday or modified: yesterday mole. (The order doesn’t matter.)So where’s the master list of these available criteria? It turns out that they correspondto the column headings at the top of an Explorer window that’s in Details view: Name,Date modified, Type, Size, and so on.You’re not limited to just the terms you see now; you can use any term that can bean Explorer-window heading. To see them all, right-click any of the existing columnheadings in a window that’s in Details view. From the shortcut menu, choose More.There they are: 115 different criteria, including Size, Rating, Album, Bit rate, Cameramodel, Date archived, Language, Nickname, and so on. Here’s where you learn that,gem in the roughWildcardsWindows recognizes two traditional wildcard characters—* wildcard at the end. That is, if you search for fil, you’ll getand ?— in its searches. results like filly, filibuster, filbert, and so on, even without * at the end. The * is more useful at the beginning or middleA wildcard character means “whatever.” So if you search of search terms—when searching filenames.)for *tion, your search will find files named things like mo-tion, nation, intimidation, intuition, and so on. A search like Here’s a cool tip: When you open an Explorer window, typingin*ble would match terms like intangible, incredible, and * into the Search box produces a flat, simple list of everyindistinguishable. single file in it. That’s a great time-saver when you want to scan for a certain file but don’t feel like opening all the folders(Footnote: When placed at the beginning or in the middle within folders within folders to find it.of a search query, these wildcards don’t work to find wordsinside your files—only filenames. And there’s not much point Windows also recognizes the ? wildcard. The difference isin putting a wildcard character at the end of your search that ? means “One character appears here,” whereas the *query, because Windows always acts as though there’s a can stand for any number of characters (or no characters).

for example, to find all your Ohio Address Book friends, you’d search for home stateor province: OH.Dude, if you can’t find what you’re looking for using all those controls, it probablydoesn’t exist.Special Search CodesCertain shortcuts in the Search boxes can give your queries more power. For example: ••Document types. You can type document to find all text, spreadsheet, and Pow- erPoint files. You can also type a filename extension—.mp3 or .doc or .jpg, for example—to round up all files of a certain file type.Tip: That sort of search will include both files whose names end with that filename extension as well asfiles whose text contains that extension. If you find that searching for (for example) .jpg produces too manyresults, you can try ext: .jpg, or fileext: .jpg, or extension: .jpg, or even fileextension: .jpg. They all work thesame way: They limit the results to files whose names actually end with those filename extensions. ••Tags, authors. This is payoff time for applying tags or author names to your files (page 87). In a Search box, you can type, or start to type, Gruber Project (or any other tag you’ve assigned), and you get an instantaneous list of everything that’s relevant to that tag. Or you can type Mom or Casey or any other author’s name to see all the documents that person created. ••Utility apps. Windows comes with a bunch of geekhead programs that aren’t listed in the Start menu and have no icons—advanced technical tools like RegEdit (the Registry Editor), (the command line), and so on. By far the quickest way to open them is to type their names into the Search box. In this case, however, you must type the entire name—regedit, not just rege. And you have to use the program’s actual, on-disk name (regedit), not its human name (Registry Editor). ••Quotes. If you type in more than one word, Search works just the way Google does. That is, it finds things that contain both words somewhere inside. If you’re searching for a phrase where the words really belong together, though, put quotes around them. For example, searching for military intelligence rounds up documents that contain those two words, but not necessarily side by side. Searching for “military intelligence” finds documents that contain that exact phrase. (Insert your own political joke here.) ••Boolean searches. Windows also permits combination-search terms like AND and OR, better known to geeks as Boolean searches. That is, you can round up a single list of files that match two terms by typing, say, vacation AND kids. (That’s also how you’d find documents coauthored by two specific people—you and a pal, for example.)

Tip: You can use parentheses instead of AND, if you like. That is, typing (vacation kids) finds documentsthat contain both words, not necessarily together. If you use OR, you can find icons that match either of two search criteria. Typing jpeg OR mp3 will turn up photos and music files in a single list. The word NOT works, too. If you did a search for dolphins, hoping to turn up sea- mammal documents, but instead find your results contaminated by football-team listings, then by all means repeat the search with dolphins NOT Miami. Windows will eliminate all documents containing “Miami.”Note: You must type Boolean terms like AND, OR, and NOT in all capitals. You can even combine Boolean terms with the other special search terms described in this chapter. Find everything created in the past couple of months by search- ing for created: September OR October, for example. If you’ve been entering your name into the Properties dialog box of Microsoft Office documents, you can find all the ones created by Casey and Robin working together using author: (Casey AND Robin).Results Menu TipsIt should be no surprise that a feature as important as Search comes loaded withoptions, tips, and tricks. Here it is—the official, unexpurgated Search Tip-O-Rama:gem in the roughNatural LanguageOK, so very cool: You can search for author: (Casey OR From now on, you can type in search phrases like these:Robin NOT Smith) created: <yesterday. documents created last week music by BeethovenThat’s powerful, all right, but also totally intimidating. Ask email from Xavieryourself: Would your mother have any idea what that means? email from Robin sent yesterday pictures of Casey taken January 2009The New Microsoft, the one that created Windows 7 and classical music rated *****tried to make it user-friendly and elegant, is way ahead ofyou on this one. It has given you an alternative way to setup criteria searches: natural-language searching. That justmeans using plain English phrases instead of the usual codes.To turn on this feature, open Folder Options. (Quickest It may take you some time to experiment to a point whereroute: Open the Start menu and type enough of the word you can trust these searches, but they’re certainly easierfolder until you see Folder Options in the results list. Click than using a bunch of colons and parentheses. (Whichit.) Click the Search tab and turn on “Use natural language you can still use, by the way, even when natural languagesearch.” Click OK. search is turned on.)

••You can open anything in the results menu by highlighting it and then pressing Enter to open it. It’s incredibly convenient to open a program using this technique, because the whole thing happens very quickly and you never have to take your hands off the keyboard. That is, you might hit w to open the Start menu, type calc (to search for Calculator), and press Enter. Why does pressing Enter open Calculator? Because it’s the first item in the list of results, and its name is highlighted.••If Windows doesn’t find a program whose name matches what you’ve typed, it doesn’t highlight anything in the list. In that case, pressing Enter has a different effect: It opens up the Search Results window, which has no length limit and offers a lot more features (page 125). (Pressing Enter, in this case, is the same as clicking the “See more results” list at the bottom.) Alternatively, you can use the mouse or the arrow-key/Enter method described above to open one of the search results.••You can learn more about a search result by pointing to it without clicking. The pop-up tooltip balloon shows you the details. For a file, you see size, date, and other info; for a program or control panel, you see a description.••You can jump to the actual icon of a search result, sitting there in its actual window, instead of opening it. To do that, right-click its name, and, from the shortcut menu, choose “Open file location.” The Esc key (top-left corner of your keyboard) is a quick “back out of this” keystroke. Tap it to close the results menu and restore the Start menu to its original form.••To clear the Search box—either to try a different search or just to get the regularly scheduled Start menu back—click the little X at the right end of the Search box.gem in the roughBeyond Your Own StuffOrdinarily, Windows searches only what’s in your account— the one you want to search, and then search using the Searchyour Personal folder (page 33). From the Start menu, you box at the top of the Explorer window.can’t search what’s inside somebody else’s stuff. You won’t be given access, though, without first supplyingYet you can search someone else’s account—just not from an administrator’s password. (You don’t necessarily have tothe Start menu and not without permission. know it; you could just call an administrator over to type it in personally.) After all, the whole point of having differentStart by opening the Start menuÆComputerÆUsers folder. accounts is to ensure privacy for each person—and only theInside, you’ll find folders for all other account holders. Open administrator, or an administrator, has full rein to stomp through anyone’s stuff.

••When you need to look up a number in Address Book, don’t bother opening Mail; it’s faster to use Search. You can type somebody’s name or even part of someone’s phone number. ••Among a million other things, Windows tracks the tags (keywords) you’ve applied to your pictures. As a result, you can find, open, or insert any photo at any time, no matter what program you’re using. This is a fantastic way to insert a photo into an outgoing email message, a presentation, or a Web page you’re designing. (In a page-layout program, for example, use the Insert command, and then use the Search box that appears at the top of the Open dialog box.)Explorer-Window SearchesAll VersionsSee the Search box at the top right of every Explorer window? This, too, is a pieceof the Search empire. But there’s a big difference: The Search box in the Start menusearches your entire computer. The Search box in an Explorer window searches onlythat window (and folders within it).As you type, the window changes to show search results (in Content view) as youtype into the Search box, much the way the Start menu changes. As described on theprevious pages, a whole range of power tips is available to you, including file-typesearches, AND searches, OR searches, and so on.The beauty of an Explorer-window search is that it’s not limited to 15 results, as theStart menu is. If there are a lot of results, you see all of them in one massively scroll-ing window.Tip: What if you want to do an Explorer-window search, but no window is open? Press w-F (for “Find,”get it?) or F3. You get what amounts to an empty Explorer window, with the insertion point already in theSearch box, ready for typing.Unlike the Start menu search, though, the Explorer-window search offers a bonussearch feature, which Microsoft calls Search Builder and normal people call searchfilters.Search filtersAs soon as you start typing into the Search box, a few words appear just beneathit—blue links that say things like “Authors,” “Date modified,” and “Size.” These aresearch filters that help you weed down a big list of results.When you click one, a pop-up menu appears to help you specify what author youwant, or which dates modified, or how big the file is; Figure 3-3 should make this clear.Which search filters appear depends on what kind of folder or library you’re in. In theDocuments library, your choices include Authors, Type, Date modified, Size, Name,Folder path, Tags, and Title; for the Pictures library, you get Date taken, Tags, Type,

Date modified, Name, Size, Folder Path, and Rating; for Music, you get Album, Artists,Genre, Length, Folder Path, Year, Rating, and Title; and so on.Tip: If you make the Search box bigger—by dragging the divider bar (between the address bar and the Searchbox) to the left—then Windows has enough room to show you more search filters. Usually, there are eight in all. Figure 3-3: Left: As soon as you begin typing into an Explorer window’s Search box, you get clickable Search filters like Date taken, Tags, and Type. Right: Clicking one opens this pop-up menu that controls how to restrict your search.As soon as you set up a filter like this, two alarming things happen: ••The Search box fills up with codes. You’ll see, for example, datemodified:last week, or size:medium in blue text. These are, in fact, exactly the same codes described on page 125. In other words, these clickable search filters are nothing more than user-friendlified, quicker ways of entering the same search codes. If you’re more of a keyboard person than a mouse person, it’s perfectly OK to type those codes into the Search box manually; the result is exactly the same. You can use as many of these filters as you want. The more you click them (or type the corresponding shorthand), the longer the codes are in the Search box. If you want to find medium files created by Casey last year with the tag Murgatroid project, go right ahead.Tip: You can adjust the second part of each code just by clicking it. For example, if you chose size:small andyou really wanted size:medium—or if the size:small query didn’t produce any results—click the word small.The pop-up menu of sizes appears again so you can adjust your selection. ••The results window changes. Search filters work by hiding all the icons that don’t match. So don’t be alarmed if you click Size and then Small—and most of the files in your window suddenly disappear. Windows is doing what it thinks you wanted—showing you only the small files—in real time, as you adjust the filters. At any time, you can bring all the files back into view by clicking the little X at the right end of the Search box.

In any case, once the results appear in the main window, you can change the window view if that’s helpful, or sort, filter, and group them, just as you would in any other Explorer window. The Search Index All Versions You might think that typing something into the Search box triggers a search. But to be technically correct, Windows has already done its searching. In the first 15 to 30 minutes after you install Windows 7—or in the minutes after you attach a new hard drive—it invisibly collects information about everything on your hard drive. Like a kid cramming for an exam, it reads, takes notes on, and memorizes the contents of all your files. And not just the names of your files. That would be so 2004! No, Windows actually looks inside the files. It can read and search the contents of text files, email, Windows Contacts, Windows Calendar, RTF and PDF documents, and documents from Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint). In fact, Windows searches over 115 bits of text associated with your files—a staggering collection of tidbits, including the names of the layers in a Photoshop document, the tempo of an MP3 file, the shutter speed of a digital-camera photo, a movie’s copyright holder, a document’s page size, and on and on. (Technically, this sort of secondary information is called metadata. It’s usually invisible, although a lot of it shows up in the Details pane described in Chapter 2.) Windows stores all this information in an invisible, multimegabyte file called, creatively enough, the index. (If your primary hard drive is creaking full, you can specify that you want the index stored on some other drive; see page 137.) Once it’s indexed your hard drive in this way, Windows can produce search results in seconds. It doesn’t have to search your entire hard drive—only that single card- catalog index file. After the initial indexing process, Windows continues to monitor what’s on your hard drive, indexing new and changed files in the background, in the microseconds between your keystrokes and clicks. Where Windows Looks Windows doesn’t actually scrounge through every file on your computer. Searching inside Windows’s own operating-system files and all your programs, for example, would be pointless to anyone but programmers. All that useless data would slow down searches and bulk up the invisible index file. What Windows does index is everything in your Personal folder (page 33): email, pictures, music, videos, program names, entries in your Address Book and Calendar, Office documents, and so on. It also searches all your libraries (page 81), even if they contain folders from other computers on your network.132 windows 7: the missing manual

Similarly, it searches offline files that belong to you, even though they’re stored some-where else on the network (page 622). Finally, it indexes everything in the Start menu.Note: Windows indexes all the drives connected to your PC, but not other hard drives on the network. Youcan, if you wish, add other folders to the list of indexed locations manually (page 133).Windows does index the Personal folders of everyone else with an account on yourmachine (Chapter 23), but you’re not allowed to search them from the Start menu.So if you were hoping to search your spouse’s email for phrases like “meet you atmidnight,” forget it.The Older, Slower Kind of SearchIf you try to search anything Windows hasn’t incorporated into its index—in a Win-dows system folder, for example, or a hard drive elsewhere on the network—a messageappears. It lets you know that because you’re working beyond the index’s wisdom,the search is going to be slow, and the search will include filenames only—not filecontents or metadata.Furthermore, this kind of outside-the-index searching doesn’t find things as youtype. This time, you have to press Enter after typing the name (or partial name) ofwhat you want to find.Adding New Places to the IndexOn the other hand, suppose there’s some folder on another disk (or elsewhere on thenetwork) that you really do want to be able to search the good way—contents and all,nice and fast. You can do that by adding it to your PC’s search index.And you can do that in a couple of ways: ••Add it to a library. Drag any folder into one of your libraries (page 81). After a couple of minutes of indexing, that folder is now ready for insta-searching, contents and all, just as though it were born on your own PC. ••Add it to the Indexing Options dialog box. Windows maintains a master list of everything in its search index. That’s handy, because it means you can easily add folders to the index—folders from an external hard drive, for example—for speedy searches. You can remove folders from the index, too, maybe because you have privacy con- cerns (for example, you don’t want your spouse searching your stuff while you’re away from your desk). Or maybe you just want to create more focused searches, removing a lot of old, extraneous junk from Windows’s database. Either way, the steps are simple. Open the Indexing Options control panel; the quickest way is to open the Start menu and start typing indexing until you see Indexing Options in the search results. Click it, and proceed as shown in Figure 3-4.

Tip: If you’re trying to get some work done while Windows is in the middle of building the index, and theindexing is giving your PC all the speed of a slug in winter, you can click the Pause button. Windows will coolits jets for 15 minutes before it starts indexing again. Figure 3-4: You can add or remove disks, partitions, or folders in the list of searchable items. Start by opening Indexing Options (left), then click Modify. Now expand the flippy triangles, if necessary, to see the list of folders on your hard drive. Turn a folder’s checkbox on (to have Windows index it) or off (to remove it from the index, and therefore from searches). In this example, you’ve just told Windows to stop indexing your Downloads folder. Click OK.Customizing SearchYou’ve just read about how Search works fresh out of the box. But you can tailor itsbehavior, both for security reasons and to customize it to the kinds of work you do.Unfortunately for you, Microsoft has stashed the various controls that govern search-ing into three different places. Here they are, one area at a time:Folder OptionsThe first source is in the Folder OptionsÆSearch dialog box. To open it, chooseOrganizeÆ“Folder and search options” in any Explorer window. In the resultingdialog box, click the Search tab. You wind up at the dialog box shown in Figure 3-5. ••What to search. As the previous pages make clear, the Windows search mecha- nism relies on an index—an invisible database that tracks the location, contents, and metadata of every file. If you attach a new hard drive, or attempt to search another computer on the network that hasn’t been indexed, Windows ordinarily just searches its files’ names. After all, it has no index to search for that drive.

If Windows did attempt to index those other drives, you’d sometimes have to waitawhile, at least the first time, because index-building isn’t instantaneous. That’s whythe factory setting here is: “In indexed locations, search file names and contents.In non-indexed locations, search file names only.”Figure 3-5:Search actually works beautifully right out ofthe box. For the benefit of the world’s tweakers,however, this dialog box awaits, filled withtechnical adjustments to the way Search works. But if you really want Windows to search the text inside the other drives’ files, 135 even without an index—which can be painfully slow—turn on “Always search file names and contents” instead.••Include subfolders in search results when searching in file folders. When you use the Search box at the top of an Explorer window, Windows ordinarily searches the currently open window and the folders inside it. Turn off this option if you want to search only what you see in the window before you.••Find partial matches. Turn this off if you want Windows to find only whole-word matches, meaning that you’ll no longer be able to type waff to find Mom’s Best Waffle Recipes of the Eighties.doc.••Use natural language search. See the box on page 128. chapter 3: searching & organizing your files