See the Search text box at the top of every Explorer window? This, too, is a piece of the Vista Search empire. But there’s a big difference: The Search box in the Start menu searches your entire computer. The Search box in an Explorer window searches only this window (and folders within it).
As you type, the window changes to show search results as you type into the Search box, much the way the Start menu changes. Once the results appear, you can sort, filter, group, and stack them just like the icons in any other Explorer window.
As described in Chapter 3, you can adorn every Explorer window with up to four different panes—inch-wide strips at the left, right, top, and bottom of a window. One of them is the Search pane.
You can get to it in several ways:
▸ Press
+F, which is the keyboard shortcut for the Search window (for find, get it?).
▸ After a regular Explorer-window search, open the Search Tools menu that now appears in the task toolbar. Choose Search Pane.
▸ After a regular Explorer-window search, click Advanced Search at the bottom of the results list (Figure 4-3).
As you can see in Figure 4-3, the Search pane lets you fine-tune the search by adding controls like these:
▸ Show only. If you know what you’re looking for is an email message, document, picture, or music file, click the corresponding button. Your search will reveal only the kind of file you asked for. For example, when you’re trying to free up some space on your drive, you could round up all your gigantic photo files. (“Other,” here, means everything except email, documents, pictures, or music.)
▸ Location. The choices in this pop-up menu—Everywhere, Indexed Locations, Computer, Local Hard Drives, and so on—affect the scope of your search. Ordinarily, searching in an Explorer window finds icons only within the open window, including what’s in its subfolders. But using this pop-up menu, you can make an Explorer-window search do what a Start-menu search always does: search your entire computer. Or only your main hard drive. Or all hard drives. Whatever.
In fact, if you choose “Choose search locations” from this pop-up menu, you get a collapsible, flippy-triangle list of every disk and folder associated with your PC). Checkboxes give you complete freedom to specify any crazy, mixed-up assortment of random folders you’d like to search at once.
▸ Date modified/created. When you choose one of these options from the first pop-up menu, the second and third pop-up menus let you isolate files, programs, and folders according to the last time you changed them or when they were created.
▸ Name. Vista can find text anywhere in your files, no matter what their names are. But when you do want to search for an icon only by the text that’s in its name, this is your ticket. Capitalization doesn’t matter.
▸ Tags. If you’re in the practice of assigning tags (keywords) to your documents, using the Properties dialog box or the Details pane (Section 3.3.2), you can use the tag search feature to round up all icons that have a certain tag. They might be all files pertaining to a certain project, for example, or that you wrote during your dry spell of ’06.
▸ Size. Using this control, and its “equals/is less than/is greater than” pop-up menu, you can restrict your search to files of a certain size. Use the text box to specify the file’s size, in kilobytes. If you want to round up files larger than 5 gigabytes, for example, you’ll have to type 5242880, or, if “close enough” is close enough, 5000000.
Figure 4-3. You can gain much more control over the search process using the Search pane. Top: One way to make it appear is to choose “Search pane” from the Search Tools menu, which appears after you perform a regular Explorer-window search. Bottom: At that point, you can click Advanced to open a much more powerful, expanded version of the Search strip.
A key feature of the Advanced Search pane is that it lets you combine criteria. Using these controls, you can set up a search for email messages created last week with file sizes over 200 K, for example, or pictures under 500K that are at least two months old and bear the tag Detroit Coffee-Table Book Project.
If you’ve slogged through this chapter up to this point, you’re probably under the impression that searching all your stuff (not just one window) requires using the Start menu.
Technically, however, that’s not quite true. Vista also offers a Search window, a sort of hybrid of the Search and Explorer methods. Figure 4-4 explains; for now, just note that you can open the Search window by pressing F3 or
+F.
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