How to search efficiently on Windows

We often need to look for a file on our PC and don´t really know how to do it.

You can do it in a number of ways, but I’ll tell you one way in which you will surely find the file you are looking for.

To look for a file efficiently, you’ll need to download Total Commander. For those who don’t know it, Total Commander is a file manager with advanced features. Download Total Commander.

Here you have a Total Commander image. Do not get scared, at first it may seem a little confusing and with many buttons. But that’s only the first impression, little by little you’ll learn how to use it.

Now let’s go to the search screen. We press Alt F7 or go to Commands-gt; Search. The following screen will appear.

As you can see the screen has four tabs: General, Advanced, Plugins, Open/Save. We are just going to use the first two (General and Advanced). Although we mostly use the General tab.

We will now explain the General tab. As you may see, there are 6 zones:

1.Search

2.Search in

3.Regex

4.Files (ZIP, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, CAB)

5.Search in subdirectories

6.Search Text

1.Search

This search box is where we enter the name of the file we want to find. Imagine you want to find ‘Schedule.odt’. For that, we would enter “schedule.odt” (bear in mind that the search does not recognize capitalized or lower-case letters, so Schedule and schedule would be the same).

Before we continue with the next zones, I am going to explain very quicly the theory about Windows file names.

A Windows file name is divided into two parts: File_name. extension.

In the case of Schedule.odt we obtain: file_name= Schedule and extension= odt.

The file name and extension are separated by a dot.

Many of you may not see the extension on Windows file explorer, that’s because the Windows explorer does not show the file extensions. Using Total Commander, you will be able to see the file extensions, which will allow you get more information about the file.

Well, now that we knoe a file has a name and extension, I’ll give you some tips to improve your searches.

There’s no need to enter the name extension. Imagine we only remember the name of the file ‘schedule’. Then we’d only look for ‘schedule’. The result is as follows:

On the result we can see that two files have been found: Schedule.odt y schedule2.odt. It seems like the search has worked. But we can be more specific when searching. Imagine you know the file name is ‘schedule’ and you cannot remmeber the extension. Then you’d enter the following: (schedule.*).

As you can see, we now have the dile Schedule.odt. That’s because we have told the system to look for a file called ‘Schedule’ and any extension. The * works as a joker so it can be substituted by any number of characters.

Here you have some examples:

schedule – the system looks for any file containing this word. Some of the results to this search would be: Schedule.odt, schedule2.odt, nuevoschedule.odt.

schedule.* the system looks for files with the name ‘schedule’, and providing the file extension. Possible results: schedule.odt, Schedule.doc, schedule.png.

There are other choices for file searches but just knowing how to use the * and knowing that the files are composed by name.extension, you eill sure be able to find any file you are looking for.

Search in here we’ll enter the location where we want to look for the file. For instance: c:documents. The location may be a directory (by pushing buttom gt;gt; you’ll be able to choose the directory) or a pc drive (by pushing Drives, you’ll be able to choose one or several drives from your PC). 3.Regex Well, this is quite an advanced option allowes you to seach for files using regular expresions. If you want to know more about regular expresions you can click on this link: What are regular expressions?. 4.Files (ZIP, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, CAB). This option is very useful and allowes you to look for files which are in zip format, looking for them within those zipped files. 5.Search in subdirectories. This option allows you to look for a file that is within the search route subdirectories. The usual thing to do is to choose the All option. 6.Search Text: This is a very interesting option since it allows us to look for the files’ content. Imagine you’ve got several .txt files or several web .html pages saved on your PC and you only want to look for those files containing the word Ares. The only thing to do is leaving file 1 empty (Search), choose the route you want to search (field 2), enter field 6 (Search Text) and enter Ares on the text box from field 6. Then Total Commander will search for those files caontaining the word Ares in it.

Well, this is only a brief summary of the possibilities you’ve got with Total Commander when searching for files. I hope it was useful.