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| February 1998 | Volume 8 • Number 2 |
Post-Christmas laziness, and other excuses ... by Clint Wilson
Time to quit fooling around and get this here column written. It may not appear until the February issue, but as I write this, it's just a couple of days past Christmas. I've been busy hooking up new computer toys, like my new scanner, loading new games, and installing the latest version of Quicken.
I have been a little surprised (and relieved) by the lack of death threats following my last column. I'd been told that Mac users were a wildly fanatical bunch, and wouldn't take my slanderous comments with grace and good humor. Guess they've had all the spunk beaten out of them over the last couple of years; I hope their retirement funds weren't in Apple stock.
Anyway, time to get serious and earn my wages. I've noticed that lately, and some of you have too, that I've been obsessing on Windows 95. Well, no sense in changing now; there're a lot of columns to be written on Windows 95 features. (For lack of a monitor, and motivation, my Windows 3.1 computer is down anyway.)
The Windows 95 operating system, as many of you are undoubtedly aware, has a handy little utility called Find. I use this program daily, hourly and sometimes every few minutes. I basically do not have a highly organized mind, or even a lowly organized mind, and am constantly losing track of where I put files. Actually it's worse than that, most of the time I pay no attention whatsoever where they go. So, thank God and Microsoft for Find.
The Find program can be located by clicking on the Start button, then select Find. It is also accessible in Windows Explorer, under the Tools menu.
In its simplest form, Find is very easy to use; just type the file name in the text box labeled "Named." Next, from the drop-down menu labeled "Look in," select a folder or drive in which to conduct your search. Be sure to check the "Include subfolders" box, or your search will be limited to the main directories, and you'll miss looking at a few thousand files. If you're on a network, you'll find an option to search only your workstation's drives. You can even search every drive available to you by selecting "My Computer." Click the Find Now button, and away you go.
If everything goes well, in a few seconds you will have the results displayed in a window below the main Find screen.
Now, what if, and I find that this is the case most of the time, you don't remember the file's whole name and extension? This is where Find really begins to shine.
Type in whatever part of the file name you do know; the more you type in the more selective the search will be. For example, when I entered ms in the Named window, the search returned 780 files, but when I added an "h" to make it msh, the search only returned 15 files.
One more thing: By simply typing in msh, you'll get every file that contains that particular letter grouping, whether they are the first letters of a file or occur somewhere in the middle of the file's name.
To find only those files that begin with those letters, you must use "wildcards." There are two wildcards, the asterisk (*) and the question mark (?). The asterisk can be used to substitute for any number of characters. The question mark, on the other hand, is used to substitute for one character at a specific location in the search string.
For example, if you wish to find all files on the computer that have an extension of .rpt (i.e., file1.rpt, file2.rpt, etc.), you would type *.rpt in the Named box. Or, say you wanted to locate a group of files whose names all begin with the last two numbers of the year (95Budget.doc, 96budget.doc, and 97Budget.doc, etc.); you could type in 9?Budget.doc in the Named box. Pretty cool, huh? As you can see though, it helps to have some kind of consistency in naming your files and file types.
You may also search for files by date. Click on the Date Modified tab. A new screen will appear from which you can specify a search for files modified by single date, or for files modified between two given dates. You can also search for all files either created or modified in a recent period of time, such as the last day, last week, last month.
Another convenient addition to the Find utility is the Quick View program. With Quick View, you can right click on any file in the returned files window and a drop-down menu will appear with Quick View as one of the options. Clicking on Quick View allows you to view the contents of the file without launching the file's host application.
If your search returns a large number of files, you may want to adjust the way they are presented in the window. Click on the Name heading to sort the files alphabetically. Click again, and the files are arranged in order from Z to A. The same is true for the Size window, click once to place the files in ascending order, click again to arrange them in descending order. File types can also be organized in either ascending or descending order.
Now click on the Advanced tab. Here you are not restricted to searches pertaining to filename; you can look for files containing certain words or parts of words in the body of the file itself.
In the "Of Type" drop-down menu, click on the down arrow for a list of all the various types of application files resident on your computer. You may restrict your search to one of these file types or you can specify "all files and folders." Don't forget to put the selection back to "all files and folders" when you're through. It is easy to forget, and could severely restrict your next search.
The next box down, labeled "Containing text," is where you can enter the text for your search.
The last two boxes allow you to restrict the file search to files of a given size. The first box allows a choice of not selecting anything, or "at least" or "at most"; these refer to the size of the files that you set in the next box over. Finally, in the second box you can set the file size limitations for the search.
So after going through all this trouble setting up this search, you turn off the computer, and poof (yes, I did say "poof," what are you going to do about it? Anyway, as I was saying...) poof, there goes all your work, and you have to create the same complex set of search criteria again next time.
Well, not necessarily. There is a way to save the fruit of your labors. If, perchance you do find yourself wanting to save a set of search criteria so you may rerun this same search at some future date, click on the File menu, then click on Save Search.
Then, what the heck? Where'd it go? I expected to have a window open and ask me where I wanted to put this mess. What really happens, however, is that the search is saved as an icon to the desktop. Seems kind of silly to me, but what do I know?
Anyway, what you gotta do now is go to the desktop, right click on the search icon and select Cut. Then open Explorer to whatever directory or folder where you wish to save this puppy, right click on the folder, and select Paste. Voila (or, as we hillbillies say, Vi ola); there she is.
Speaking of there she is, seems like a good spot to say adios, arrivederci and I gotta get this sent or the next thing I'll see will be Heinlein leading a mob of Mac users in my general direction with torches, tar, and enough feathers to last into the next millennium.