The Taskbar Search Box

The search box is always on the screen as part of the taskbar. Here’s how you might perform a search:

1. Get your insertion point into the search box. You can click or tap the box (Figure 3-1, left), or press either of these keystrokes:

   opens the Start menu. But it also puts your blinking cursor into the search box.

   +S keystroke tells Cortana (Chapter 5) that you’re about to type a request. But in Windows 10, Cortana is part of Search, so +S puts your cursor into the search box, just as you’d hope. Makes mnemonic sense, too: S stands for Search.

   If your laptop has what Microsoft calls a precision touchpad (a multitouch trackpad like the one on a Surface), you can also tap the trackpad with three fingers simultaneously to open the Cortana panel and pop your cursor into the search box. (You can adjust this gesture in Settings; see “Trackpad Settings”.)

   Note:

   The first time you use the search box, Windows displays a panel that informs you of the kind of information it needs to collect. Click “I agree” to continue—or see “Setting Up Cortana” to find out more about this data.

   At this point, you can click either Apps, Documents, or Web to limit your search to those realms—but you can also do that kind of refinement after you do the search.

2. Start typing what you want to find (Figure 3-1, right).

   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 “File Types tab”.)

   As you type, search results begin to appear in the space formerly occupied by the Start menu, grouped by category (Figure 3-1). This is a live, interactive search; that is, Windows modifies the menu as you type—you don’t have to press Enter after entering your search phrase.

   

   Figure 3-1. Left: “Type here to search” is your passport to searching your computer, network, OneDrive, and the web.
   Right: You won’t always see your search term itself (“pre,” here) in the results list. That’s because Windows is also searching words inside the files. The matching result may be a word inside the text of a document, or even in the invisible tags associated with a file.

   The Search feature can find every file; folder; program; email message; address book entry; calendar appointment; picture; movie; PDF document; music file; web bookmark; and Word, PowerPoint, and Excel document that contains what you typed, regardless of its name or folder location.

   In fact, Windows isn’t just searching icon names. It’s also searching their contents—the words inside your documents—as well as your files’ metadata. (That’s descriptive text information about what’s in a file, like its height, width, size, creator, copyright holder, title, editor, created date, and last modification date. “File Types tab” has the details.)

   And it’s not just finding stuff on your PC. The results also include matches from whatever is on your OneDrive (“OneDrive”), apps on the Windows app store, and even websites found online by Microsoft’s Bing search service.

   Tip:

   If you’d rather not include your OneDrive contents in searches, open→→Cortana→Permissions & History and turn off Windows Cloud Search.

3. If you see the item you were hoping to dig up, tap or click to open it.

   In fact, if that thing is listed first in the results menu, tinted, then you can press Enter to open it.

   The search box, in other words, is an incredibly fast way to open a program you want. You should use it all the time. The whole thing happens very quickly, and you never have to take your hands off the keyboard. That is, you might hit +S, 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.)

   Why burrow around in folders when you can open any file or program with a couple of keystrokes?

   If the thing you want is not at the top of the list, click it, tap it, or “walk” down to it with the arrow keys, and then press Enter to open it.

   Tip:

   Unless you intervene (“Folder Options”), Search shows you results both from your computer and from the web, all in the same list. It takes an additional click to see only one or the other. Click above the list to search just File Explorer, to search just your documents, or to open your browser and complete the search using Microsoft’s Bing search service.

4. If you don’t see what you’re looking for, click a category heading to see more results.

   That step may take a little explanation; read on.

Filtering the Results

The search results menu has room for only a few items. Unless you own one of those rare 60-inch Skyscraper Displays, there just isn’t room to show you the whole list.

Instead, Windows uses some fancy analysis to display the most likely matches for what you typed. They appear grouped into categories like Apps, Settings, Folders, Documents, and Store (meaning apps from the Windows app store).

Such a short list of likely suspects means it’s easy to arrow-key your way to the menu item you want to open. And Windows does a pretty good job at guessing which two or three search results to show you in each category.

On the other hand, you might have 425 different documents containing the word “syzygy,” and you’ll see only three of them in the search-results list.

Fortunately, Windows offers four different ways to filter the list of results, so that it shows only the results in a certain category:

• Click the category heading. Click the word Apps, or Settings, or Documents, or whatever. And boom: The list changes to show you only the search results in that category. Kind of handy, really.

• Use the buttons at the top of the list. They limit the results to apps, documents, and the web, respectively. (You can see these buttons at right in Figure 3-1.)

• Use the Filters drop-down menu at top right. It offers the complete list of categories you can use to limit the results: Apps, Documents, Emails, Folders, Music, People, Photos, Settings, Videos, or Web.

• Use search shorthand. When you use any of the three methods described so far, you may notice something weird going on in the search box itself: New words appear there. If you search for kumquat and then click the Apps icon at top left, for example, the search box now says “apps: kumquat.” If you then click the Web icon, it changes to say “web: kumquat.” (You can see an example in Figure 3-2.)

  

  Figure 3-2. Click a category heading to see more of the search results in that category.
  You can filter your search results by just about every type of file by clicking the Filters drop-down menu.

  In other words, those clickable buttons and menus are just human-friendly ways of modifying your search query in the way Windows really understands: with search codes. Given that fact, there’s nothing to stop you from typing them manually. If you want to find a document called “Pretzel Recipe,” you can do a search for docs: pretzel (or documents: pretzel). If you’re hunting for a song called “Tie a Purple Ribbon,” you can just type music: purp or something.

Where Windows Looks

Windows doesn’t actually scrounge through every file on your computer. Searching inside Windows’ 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: email, pictures, music, videos, program names, entries in your People and Calendar apps, Office documents, and so on. It searches your OneDrive, too (“OneDrive”), as well as your libraries (“Libraries”), even if they contain folders from other computers on your network.

Similarly, it searches offline files that belong to you, even though they’re stored somewhere else on the network.

Windows does index the personal folders of everyone else with an account on your machine (Chapter 18), but you’re not allowed to search them. So if you were hoping to search your spouse’s email for phrases like “Meet you at midnight,” forget it.

Adding New Places to the Index

On the other hand, suppose there’s some folder on another disk (or elsewhere on the network) 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 from the Filters menu. After running a search, open the Filters menu (Figure 3-2), scroll all the way down to “Change where Windows searches,” and hit “Select locations.” The Indexing Options dialog box appears; see Figure 3-3.

  You can remove folders from the index, too, maybe because you have privacy concerns (for example, you don’t want your coworkers 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’ database.

• Add it to a library. Drag any folder into one of your libraries (“Libraries”). 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.

This dialog box offers a few other useful search settings; see “Indexing Options”.

Figure 3-3. In the Indexing Options box, you can add or remove disks, partitions, or folders, thereby editing the list of searchable items.
Start by opening Indexing Options (left), and 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.

Search Options on the Ribbon

When you use the File Explorer search box, the Ribbon magically sprouts a new tab, called Search (Figure 3-4). It’s teeming with options, including search filters that help you weed down a big list of results:

• This PC. This button, at far left, does the opposite of weed down your results—it expands the scope of your search. You’ve just searched this Explorer window, but this button applies the same search to your entire computer.

• Current folder. An Explorer search usually searches the window that’s open and all the folders inside it. If you click this button, though, you eliminate the subfolders from the results.

• All subfolders. Remember the fun you had reading the “Current folder” paragraph just now? This button has the opposite function. It expands the search’s reach to include this window’s subfolders once again.

• Search again in. This handy drop-down menu lists places you’ve recently searched. Now and then, one of these options can save you time and fiddling.

• Date modified, Kind, Size, Other properties. These are search filters. They refine your search, letting you limit the results to certain date ranges, file types, file sizes, and so on.

  When you use these menus, you’ll see codes in blue text appear in the search box—for example, datemodified:last week or size:medium. If you’re more of a keyboard person than a mouse person, you could type those codes into the search box yourself; the result is exactly the same, as described in the next section. In other words, the options on the Ribbon are nothing more than user-friendlified, quicker ways of entering the same search codes.

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.

So what do they do? The “Date modified” drop-down menu offers choices like Today, Yesterday, Last Month, and This Year. “Kind” is a long list of file types, with choices like Folder, Game, Note, Picture, and Web History. “Size” offers file-size ranges like Tiny (0 to 10 KB), Medium (100 KB to 1 MB), Huge (16 to 128 MB), and Gigantic (greater than 128 MB).

As for the miscellaneous filters in the “Other properties” pop-up menu—well, they require some explanation.

Type lets you specify (after the word Type: in the search box) what general kind of thing you’re looking for: picture, sound, PDF, document, folder, disk image, backup, JPG, DOC, and so on. More on types in a moment.

Name lets you search for something by its filename only. (Otherwise, Windows also shows you search results based on the words inside the files.)

Folder path lets you type out the folder path (“The File Explorer Address Bar”) of something you’re seeking.

Finally, Tags lets you search for items according to the label you’ve applied to them, as described in “Tags, Metadata, and Properties”.

• Recent searches displays—correct!—recent searches you’ve performed. It uses the shorthand described above, like “portrait of mary kind:image” or “Book list size:medium.”

• Advanced options is a shortcut to some of the options described in “Adding New Places to the Index”, pertaining to non-indexed locations (that is, other computers on your network, or external drives). Here you can turn on the searching of zipped files and system files in those places, or turn on searching of text inside their files. You also get a shortcut to the Indexing Options dialog box described in “File Explorer Window Searches”.

• Save search. This button becomes available once you’ve set up a search.

  When clicked, it generates a saved search file and asks you to name it. (Behind the scenes, it’s a special document with the filename extension .search-ms.) Windows proposes stashing it in your Saved Searches folder, inside your personal folder, but you can choose any location you like—including the desktop.

  Whenever you click the saved search, you get an instantaneous update of the search you originally set up.

  The idea is to save you time when you regularly have to set up the same search; for example, maybe every week you have to round up all the documents authored by you that pertain to the Higgins proposal and save them to a flash drive. A search folder can do the rounding-up part with a single click. These items’ real locations may be all over the map, scattered in folders throughout your PC. But through the magic of the saved search, they appear as though they’re all in one neat window.

Incidentally: 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 at the right end of the search box.

Limit by Size, Date, Rating, Tag, Author…

Suppose you’re looking for a file called Big Deals.doc. But when you type big into the search box, you wind up wading through hundreds of files that contain the word “big.”

It’s at times like these you’ll be grateful for Windows’ little-known criterion searches. 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, followed by a colon.

An example is worth a thousand words, so several examples should save an awful lot of paper. You can type these codes into the search box in an Explorer window (they don’t work in the main search box):

• name: big finds only documents with “big” in their names. Windows ignores anything 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: 7/25/18 finds everything you wrote on July 25, 2018. You can also use modified: today or modified: yesterday, for that matter. Or don’t be that specific. Just use modified: July or modified: 2018.

  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 2018, you could type received: 3/1/2018..3/15/2018. (That two-dot business also works to specify a range of file sizes, as in size: 2 MB..5 MB.)

• 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: Sony A7 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, 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.”

So where’s the master list of these available criteria? It turns out they correspond to the column headings at the top of an Explorer window 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 be an Explorer-window heading. To see them all, right-click any of the existing column headings in a window that’s set to Details view. From the shortcut menu, choose More. There they are: 115 different criteria, including Size, Rating, Album, Bit rate, Camera model, Date archived, Language, Nickname, and so on. Here’s where you learn that, for example, to find all your Ohio address-book friends, you’d search for home state or province: OH.

Dude, if you can’t find what you’re looking for using all those controls, it probably doesn’t exist.

Special Search Codes

Certain shortcuts in the File Explorer search boxes can give your queries more power. For example:

• Document types. You can type document to find all text, spreadsheet, and PowerPoint 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.

• Tags, authors. This is payoff time for applying tags or author names to your files (“Tags, Metadata, and Properties”). 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), Command Prompt (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.)

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.”

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 searching 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).

File Explorer Results Menu Tips

It should be no surprise that a feature as important as Search comes loaded with options, tips, and tricks. Here it is—the official, unexpurgated Search Tip-O-Rama:

• You can open anything in the results menu by highlighting it and then pressing Enter to open it.

• 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 File Explorer window back—click the little at the right end of the search box.

• When you need to look up a number in the People app, 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.

Cortana Settings

In →→Cortana, you’ll find some settings that govern how your PC conducts web searches. For example, you can apply some sex-and-hate filtering to its search results, make it stop keeping a record of your web searches, and so on. See “Setting Up Cortana”.

Folder Options

The second source of search settings is the Folder Options→Search dialog box. To open it, find the View tab on the Ribbon in any Explorer window; click Options. In the resulting dialog box, click the Search tab. Here’s what you’ll find:

• Don’t use the index when searching in file folders for system files. If you turn this item on, Windows won’t use its internal Dewey Decimal System for searching Windows itself. It will, instead, perform the names-only, slower type of search.

  So who on earth would want this turned on? You, if you’re a programmer or system administrator and you’re worried that the indexed version of the system files might be out of date. (That happens, since system files change often, and the index may take some time to catch up.)

• Include system directories. When you’re searching a disk that hasn’t been indexed, do you want Windows to look inside the folders that contain Windows itself (as opposed to just the documents people have created)? If yes, then turn this on.

• Include compressed files (ZIP, CAB…). When you’re searching a disk that hasn’t been indexed, do you want Windows to search for files inside compressed archives, like .zip and .cab files? If yes, then turn on this checkbox. (Windows doesn’t ordinarily search archives, even on an indexed hard drive.)

• Always search file names and contents. As the previous pages make clear, the Windows search mechanism 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, then 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 wait awhile, at least the first time, because index-building isn’t instantaneous. That’s why the factory setting here is Off.

  But if you really want Windows to search the text inside the other drives’ files, even without an index—which can be painfully slow—then turn this checkbox on instead.

Indexing Options

The third location of search settings is shown in Figure 3-5. This is Index Settings, the master control over the search index, the massive, invisible, constantly updated database file that tracks your PC’s files and what’s in them. As described earlier, you can use this dialog box to add or remove folders from what Windows is tracking.

But there are a few more handy options here, lurking behind the Advanced Indexing Options button.

To open this box, click in the Cortana search box, type a random letter or two, and, in the results list, hit Filters. Scroll way down until you can see and choose “Select locations.”

Figure 3-5. Search works beautifully right out of the box. For the benefit of the world’s tweakers, however, this dialog box awaits, filled with technical adjustments to the way Search works.

By clicking Modify, you can add or remove folders and disks from Windows’ searchlight (Figure 3-5).

What’s in the Local Disk (C:) Window

If you double-click the Local Disk (C:) icon in This PC—that is, your primary hard drive—you’ll find, at least, these standard folders.

Your Personal Folder

Everything that makes your Windows experience your own sits inside the Local Disk (C:) Users [your name] folder. This is your personal folder, where Windows stores your preferences, documents, email, pictures, music, web favorites, cookies (described in “Five Degrees of Web Protection”), and so on.

To create a new folder, right-click where you want the folder to appear (on the desktop or in any File Explorer window except This PC), and choose New→Folder from the shortcut menu. The new folder appears with its temporary “New Folder” name highlighted. Type a new name for the folder and then press Enter.

But your personal folder also comes prestocked with folders like these:

• 3D Objects. This folder contains any 3D models you build using Windows 10’s creative apps, like Paint 3D and Mixed Reality Viewer. (You can’t delete this folder manually. That job requires a Registry hack; you can find instructions for it using Google.)

• Contacts. An address-book program called Windows Contacts came with Windows Vista, but Microsoft gave it a pink slip for Windows 7. All that’s left now is this folder, where it used to stash the information about your social circle. (Some other companies’ address-book programs can use this folder, too.)

• Desktop. When you drag an icon out of a folder or disk window and onto your desktop, it may appear to show up on the desktop. But that’s just a visual convenience. In truth, nothing in Windows is ever really on the desktop; it’s just in this Desktop folder, and mirrored on the desktop.

  Everyone who shares your machine, upon signing in, sees his own stuff sitting out on the desktop. Now you know how Windows does it; there’s a separate Desktop folder in every person’s personal folder. (You can entertain yourself for minutes trying to prove this. If you drag something out of your Desktop folder, it also disappears from the actual desktop. And vice versa.)

• Downloads. When you download anything from the web, your browser suggests storing it on your computer in this Downloads folder. The idea is to save you the frustration of downloading stuff and then not being able to find it later.

• Favorites. This folder stores shortcuts of the files, folders, and other items you’ve designated as favorites (that is, web bookmarks). This can be handy if you want to delete a bunch of your favorites all at once, rename them, or whatever.

• Links. In older Windows versions, this folder’s icons corresponded to the easy-access links in the Favorite Links list in your Explorer windows. Today, it’s a random collection of icon shortcuts used by various other Windows features (like saved searches).

• Documents. Microsoft suggests you keep your actual work files in this folder. Sure enough, whenever you save a new document (when you’re working in Word or Photoshop Elements, for example), the Save As box proposes storing the new file in this folder.

• Music, Pictures, Videos. You guessed it: These are Microsoft’s proposed homes for your multimedia files. These are where song files from ripped CDs, photos from digital cameras, and videos from camcorders go.

• OneDrive. This is the actual, for-real storage location for your machine’s local copy of the files and folders on your OneDrive (“OneDrive”).

• Saved Games. When you save a computer game that’s in progress, the game should propose storing it here, so you can find it again later. (It may take some time before all the world’s games are updated to know about this folder.)

• Searches. As described in “Limit by Size, Date, Rating, Tag, Author…”, you can save searches for reuse later. This folder stores shortcuts for them.

By Tapping or Clicking

To select one icon, just click it once. To select multiple icons at once—in preparation for moving, copying, renaming, or deleting them en masse, for example—use one of these techniques:

• Select all. Highlight all the icons in a window by using the “Select all” button on the Ribbon’s Home tab. (Or press Ctrl+A, its keyboard equivalent.)

• Highlight several consecutive icons. Start with your cursor above and to one side of the icons, and then drag diagonally. As you drag, you create a temporary shaded blue rectangle. Any icon that falls within this rectangle darkens to indicate that it’s been selected.

  Alternatively, click the first icon you want to highlight, and then Shift-click the last one. All the files in between are automatically selected, along with the two you clicked. (These techniques work in any folder view: Details, Icon, Content, or whatever.)

• Highlight nonconsecutive icons. Suppose you want to highlight only the first, third, and seventh icons in the list. Start by clicking icon No. 1; then Ctrl-click each of the others. (If you Ctrl-click a selected icon again, you deselect it. A good time to use this trick is when you highlight an icon by accident.)

By Typing

You can also highlight one icon, plucking it out of a sea of pretenders, by typing the first few letters of its name. Type nak, for example, to select an icon called “Naked Chef Broadcast Schedule.”

Eliminating Double-Clicks

In some ways, a File Explorer window is just like a web browser. It has a Back button, an address bar, and so on.

If you enjoy this PC-as-browser effect, you can actually take it one step further. You can set up your PC so that one click, not two, opens an icon. It’s a strange effect that some people adore, that some find especially useful on touchscreens—and that others turn off as fast as their little fingers will let them.

In any File Explorer window, on the View tab of the Ribbon, click Options.

The Folder Options control panel opens. Turn on “Single-click to open an item (point to select).” Then indicate when you want your icon’s names turned into underlined links by selecting “Underline icon titles consistent with my browser” (all icons’ names appear as links) or “Underline icon titles only when I point at them.” Click OK. The deed is done.

Now, if a single click opens an icon, you’re entitled to wonder how you’re supposed to select an icon (which you’d normally do with a single click). Take your pick:

• Point to it for about a half-second without clicking. To make multiple selections, press the Ctrl key as you point to additional icons. (And to drag an icon, just ignore all this pointing stuff—simply drag as usual.)

• Turn on the checkbox mode described next.

Checkbox Selection

It’s great that you can select icons by holding down a key and clicking—if you can remember which key must be pressed.

Turns out novices were befuddled by the requirement to Ctrl-click icons when they wanted to choose more than one. So Microsoft created a checkbox mode. In this mode, any icon you point to temporarily sprouts a little checkbox that you can click to select it (Figure 3-7).

To turn this feature on, open any Explorer window, and then turn on “Item check boxes,” which is on the View tab of the Ribbon.

Now, anytime you point to an icon, an on/off checkbox appears. No secret keystrokes are necessary for selecting icons; it’s painfully obvious how you’re supposed to choose only a few icons out of a gaggle.

Figure 3-7. Each time you point to an icon, a clickable checkbox appears. Once you turn it on, the checkbox remains visible, making it easy to select several icons at once. What’s cool about the checkboxes feature is that it doesn’t preclude your using the old click-to-select method; if you click an icon’s name, you deselect all checkboxes except that one.

Renaming Your Icons

To rename a file, folder, printer, or disk icon, you need to open its “renaming rectangle.” You can do so with any of the following methods:

• Highlight the icon and then press the F2 key.

• Highlight the icon. On the Home tab of the Ribbon, click Rename.

• Click carefully, just once, on a previously highlighted icon’s name.

• Right-click the icon (or hold your finger down on it) and choose Rename from the shortcut menu.

In any case, once the renaming rectangle has appeared, type the new name you want and then press Enter. Use all the standard text-editing tricks: Press Backspace to fix a typo, press the and keys to position the insertion point, and so on. When you’re finished editing the name, press Enter to make it stick. (If another icon in the folder has the same name, Windows beeps and makes you choose another name.)

A folder or filename can technically be up to 260 characters long. In practice, though, you won’t be able to produce filenames that long; that’s because that maximum must also include the file extension (the three-letter suffix that identifies the file type) and the file’s folder path (like (C:) Users Casey Pictures).

Note, too, that because they’re reserved for behind-the-scenes use, Windows doesn’t let you use any of these symbols in a Windows filename: / : * ? “ < > |

You can give more than one file or folder the same name, as long as they’re not in the same folder.

Icon Properties

Properties are a big deal in Windows. Properties are preference settings that you can change independently for every icon on your machine.

To view the properties for an icon, choose from these techniques:

• Right-click the icon; choose Properties from the shortcut menu.

• Highlight the icon in an Explorer window; click the Properties button. It’s the wee tiny icon at the upper-left corner of the window, in the Quick Access toolbar. Looks like a tiny page with a checkmark ().

• Highlight the icon. On the Ribbon, on the Home tab, click Properties.

• While pressing Alt, double-click the icon.

• Highlight the icon; press Alt+Enter.

These settings aren’t the same for every kind of icon, however. Here’s what you can expect when opening the Properties dialog boxes of various icons (Figure 3-8).

Disks

In a disk’s Properties dialog box, you can see all kinds of information about the disk itself, like its name (which you can change right there in the box), its capacity (which you can’t), and how much of it is full.

This dialog box’s various tabs are also gateways to a host of maintenance and backup features, including Disk Cleanup, Error-Checking, Defrag, Backup, and Quotas; all of these are described in Chapter 17.

Figure 3-8. The Properties dialog boxes are different for every kind of icon. In the months and years to come, you may find many occasions when adjusting the behavior of some icon has big benefits in simplicity and productivity.
Top: The Properties dialog box for a song file.
Bottom: The Properties window for the computer itself looks quite a bit different. It is, in fact, part of the Control Panel.

Changing Your Icon Pictures

You can change the actual, inch-tall illustrations that Windows uses to represent the little icons in your electronic world. You can’t, however, use a single method to do so; Microsoft has divided up the controls between two different locations.

Creating and Deleting Shortcuts

To create a shortcut, use any of these tricks:

• Right-click (or hold your finger down on) an icon. From the shortcut menu, choose “Create shortcut.”

• Right-drag an icon from its current location to the desktop. (On a touchscreen, hold your finger on the icon momentarily before you drag.)

  When you release the mouse button or your finger, choose “Create shortcuts here” from the menu that appears.

• Copy an icon, as described earlier in this chapter. Open the destination window; then, on the Ribbon’s Home tab, click “Paste shortcut.”

• Drag the tiny icon at the left end of the address bar onto the desktop or into a window.

You can delete a shortcut the same way as any icon, as described in the Recycle Bin discussion in “Copying with Copy and Paste”. (Of course, deleting a shortcut doesn’t delete the file it points to.)

Unveiling a Shortcut’s True Identity

To locate the original icon from which a shortcut was made, right-click the shortcut icon and choose Properties from the shortcut menu. As shown in Figure 3-10, the resulting box shows you where to find the “real” icon. It also offers you a quick way to jump to it, in the form of the Open File Location button.

Shortcut Keyboard Triggers

Sure, shortcuts let you put favored icons everywhere you want to be. But they still require clicking to open, which means taking your hands off the keyboard—and that, in the grand scheme of things, means slowing down.

Lurking within the Shortcut Properties dialog box is another feature with intriguing ramifications: the “Shortcut key” box. By clicking here and then pressing a key combination, you can assign a personalized keystroke for the shortcut. Thereafter, by pressing that keystroke, you can summon the corresponding file, program, folder, printer, networked computer, or disk window to your screen, no matter what you’re doing on the PC. It’s really useful.

Three rules apply when choosing keystrokes to open your favorite icons:

• The keystrokes work only on shortcuts stored on your desktop. If you stash the icon in any other folder, the keystroke stops working.

• Your keystroke can’t incorporate the space bar or the Enter, Backspace, Delete, Esc, Print Screen, or Tab keys.

• Your combination must include Ctrl+Alt, Ctrl+Shift, or Alt+Shift, and another key.

  Windows enforces this rule rigidly. For example, if you type a single letter into the box (such as E), Windows automatically adds the Alt and Ctrl keys to your combination (Alt+Ctrl+E). This is the operating system’s attempt to prevent you from inadvertently duplicating one of the built-in Windows keyboard shortcuts and thoroughly confusing both you and your computer.

If you like the idea of keyboard shortcuts for your files and programs, but you’re not so hot on Windows’ restrictions, then consider installing a free macro program that lets you make any keystroke open anything anywhere. The best-known one is AutoHotkey, which is available from this book’s “Missing CD” page at www.missingmanuals.com, but there are plenty of similar (and simpler) ones. Check them out at, for example, www.shareware.com.

Copying by Dragging Icons

You can drag icons from one folder to another, from one drive to another, from a drive to a folder on another drive, and so on. (When you’ve selected several icons, drag any one of them, and the others will go along for the ride.)

Here’s what happens when you drag icons in the usual way, using the left mouse button:

• Dragging to another folder on the same disk moves the folder or file.

• Dragging from one disk to another copies the folder or file.

• Holding down the Ctrl key while dragging to another folder on the same disk copies the file. (If you do so within a single window, Windows creates a duplicate of the file called “[Filename] - Copy.”)

• Pressing Shift while dragging from one disk to another moves the folder or file (without leaving a copy behind).

Figure 3-11. Windows is a veritable chatterbox when it comes to copying or moving files.
Top: For each item you’re copying, you see a graph and a percentage-complete readout. There’s a Pause button and a Cancel button (the ). And there’s a “More details” button.
Bottom: “More details” turns out to be an elaborate graph that shows you how the speed has proceeded during the copy job. The horizontal line indicates the average speed, in megabytes per second.
Any questions?

Dragging icons into the navigation pane

You may find it easier to copy or move icons using the navigation pane, since the two-pane display format makes it easier to see where your files are and where they’re going.

Just expand the arrow brackets of the navigation pane until you can see the destination folder.

Tip:

If you accidentally click a folder in the navigation pane, its contents will pop up in the right pane, covering up the icon you wanted to copy. Click the Back button to get back to where you once belonged.

Figure 3-12. Thanks to this shortcut menu, right-dragging icons is much easier and safer than left-dragging when you want to move or copy something. If you’re dragging more than one item, a tiny numeric “badge” on the cursor reminds you how many things you’re about to move or copy.

Then find the icon you want to move in the right pane and drag it to the appropriate folder in the left pane, or vice versa. Windows copies the icon.

Tip:

This situation is also a good time to use the window Snap feature. Drag the icon’s home window against the right side of your screen; drag the destination window against the left side. Now they’re perfectly set up for drag-copying between them.

Copying or Moving Files with the Ribbon

Dragging icons to copy or move them feels good because it’s so direct; you actually see your arrow cursor pushing the icons into the new location.

But you pay a price for this satisfying illusion. That is, you may have to spend a moment or two fiddling with your windows, or clicking in the Explorer folder hierarchy, so you have a clear “line of drag” between the icon to be moved and the destination folder.

But, these days, moving or copying icons can be a one-step operation, thanks to the “Move to” and “Copy to” buttons on the Ribbon’s Home tab. The drop-down menu for each one lists frequently and recently used folders. (If the destination folder isn’t listed, then choose “Choose location” and navigate to it yourself.)

In other words, you just highlight the icons you want to move, hit “Move to” or “Copy to,” and then choose the destination folder. The deed is done, without ever having to leave the folder window where you began.

Copying with Copy and Paste

You can also move icons from one window into another using the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands. The routine goes like this:

1. Highlight the icon or icons you want to move.

   Use any of the tricks described in “Selecting Icons”.

2. Right-click (or hold your finger down on) one of the icons. From the shortcut menu, choose Cut or Copy.

   You may want to learn the keyboard shortcuts for these commands: Ctrl+C for Copy, Ctrl+X for Cut. Or use the Cut and Copy buttons on the Ribbon’s Home tab.

   The Cut command makes the highlighted icons appear dimmed; you’ve stashed them on the invisible Windows Clipboard. (They don’t actually disappear from their original nesting place until you paste them somewhere else—or hit the Esc key to cancel the operation.)

   The Copy command also places copies of the files on the Clipboard, but it doesn’t disturb the originals after you paste.

3. Right-click the window, folder icon, or disk icon where you want to put the icons. Choose Paste from the shortcut menu.

   Once again, you may prefer to use the appropriate Ribbon button, Paste, or the shortcut, Ctrl+V.

   Either way, you’ve successfully transferred the icons. If you pasted into an open window, you see the icons appear there. If you pasted onto a closed folder or disk icon, you need to open the icon’s window to see the results. And if you pasted right back into the same window, you get a duplicate of the file called “[Filename] - Copy.”

Making the Recycle Bin Less Naggy

When you get right down to it, you really have to work to get rid of a file in Windows. First you have to put the thing in the Recycle Bin. Then you have to confirm that, yes, you’re sure. Then you have to empty the Recycle Bin. Then you have to confirm that, yes, you’re sure about that.

Fortunately, those are just the factory settings. There are all kinds of ways to eliminate some of these quadruplicate confirmations. For example:

• Squelch the “Are you sure?” message. On the Ribbon’s Home tab, click the ▾ beneath the Delete button. From the shortcut menu, turn off “Show recycle confirmation.” Or, in the Recycle Bin’s Properties dialog box (Figure 3-13), turn off “Display delete confirmation dialog.” Now you’ll never get that message when you put something into the Recycle Bin.

• Bypass the Recycle Bin just this time. Again, use the ▾ beneath the Delete button on the Ribbon’s Home tab. From the shortcut menu choose “Permanently delete”; you’ve just deleted the file permanently, skipping its layover in the Recycle Bin.

• Bypass the Recycle Bin for good. If you, a person of steely nerve and perfect judgment, never delete a file in error, then your files can always bypass the Recycle Bin. No confirmations, no second chances. You’ll reclaim disk space instantly when you press the Delete key to vaporize a highlighted file or folder.

  To set this up, right-click the Recycle Bin. From the shortcut menu, choose Properties. Select “Don’t move files to the Recycle Bin. Remove files immediately when deleted” (Figure 3-13).

  And voilà! Your safety net is gone (especially if you also turn off the “Display delete confirmation dialog” checkbox—then you’re really living dangerously).

Figure 3-13. Use the Recycle Bin Properties dialog box to govern the way the Recycle Bin works, or if it even works at all. If you have multiple hard drives, the dialog box offers a tab for each of them so you can configure a separate and independent Recycle Bin on each drive.

Restoring Deleted Files and Folders

If you change your mind about sending something to the software graveyard, simply open the Recycle Bin by double-clicking. A window like the one in Figure 3-14 opens.

To restore a selected file or folder—or a bunch of them—click the “Restore this item” link on the task toolbar. Or right-click any one of the selected icons and choose Restore from the shortcut menu.

Restored means returned to the folder from whence it came—wherever it was on your hard drive when deleted. If you restore an icon whose original folder has been deleted in the meantime, Windows even recreates that folder to hold the restored file(s). (If nothing is selected, the toolbar button says “Restore all items,” but be careful: If there are weeks’ worth of icons in there, and Windows puts them all back where they came from, recreating original folders as it goes, you might wind up with a real mess.)

Emptying the Recycle Bin

While there’s an advantage to the Recycle Bin (you get to undo your mistakes), there’s also a downside: The files in the Recycle Bin occupy as much disk space as they did when they were stored in folders. Deleting files doesn’t gain you disk space until you empty the Recycle Bin.

That’s why most people, sooner or later, follow up an icon’s journey to the Recycle Bin with one of these cleanup operations:

• Right-click the Recycle Bin icon, or a blank spot in the Recycle Bin window, and choose Empty Recycle Bin from the shortcut menu.

• In the Recycle Bin window, click Empty Recycle Bin on the Ribbon’s Recycle Bin Tools/Manage tab.

  

  Figure 3-14. When you double-click the Recycle Bin (top), its window (bottom) displays information about each folder and file it holds. It’s a regular File Explorer window, so you can inspect a selected item in the Details view, if you like.

• In the Recycle Bin window, highlight only the icons you want to eliminate, and then press the Delete key. (Use this method when you want to nuke only some of the Recycle Bin’s contents.)

• Wait. When the Recycle Bin accumulates so much stuff that it occupies a significant percentage of your hard drive space, Windows empties it automatically, as described in the next section.

The first three of these procedures produce an “Are you sure?” message.

Putting Files onto OneDrive

On the PC, you use OneDrive just as you would a folder or a flash drive. Click its name in the navigation pane to see what’s in there. Drag files into its window, or onto its name, to copy them there. Make folders, add files, delete files, rename them—whatever. Any changes you make are reflected on your other computers, phones, and tablets within seconds.

Inside a program, you can choose File→Save in the usual way. When the Save box appears, click OneDrive in the navigation pane. Or choose a OneDrive folder’s name, if you’ve made one.

Offline Files

Ordinarily, the files you’ve put onto your OneDrive aren’t only online. Windows also maintains a copy of them on your computer.

That’s handy, of course, because it means you can open and edit them even when you don’t have an Internet connection. (Next time you’re online, Windows automatically transmits the changes you made to the OneDrive copy of the file—and onto all other machines you use to sign in with the same account.)

But there’s a problem with this scenario: You can’t use your OneDrive to offload big files you don’t want on your computer. You can’t use it to archive files, freeing up room on your PC’s drive. Fortunately, there’s also a solution. See Figure 3-16.

OneDrive.com

No matter where you go, no matter what computer, tablet, or phone you’re using, you can get to all the files on your OneDrive—from a web page. Just sign into your Microsoft account at onedrive.com.

Once you’re viewing the contents of a OneDrive folder (Figure 3-16, bottom), buttons across the top of the window describe all the usual tasks you might want to perform when working with files: New (folder or document), Rename, Delete, Upload and Download (files to or from OneDrive), “Move to” and “Copy to” (to move or copy things into other OneDrive folders), Share (with someone else, by sending an emailed invitation), Embed (gives you the HTML code you need to make the file show up on a web page), Sort, and so on.

If you swipe down on a tile or right-click, you get a tall menu of options. Most of them are identical to the buttons described above (Rename, Delete, and so on). But you may see other commands that pertain only to the kind of document you’ve selected. If it’s a Word, Excel, or PowerPoint document, you can open and edit it right there in your web browser. If it’s a photo, you get options like “Rotate,” “Order prints,” or “Add to album.”

Fetch: Remote Access to Your Whole PC Back Home

OneDrive has a secret feature that could come to your rescue the next time you’re away from home and realize you need something that’s on your home PC: a feature called Fetch. It lets you access everything on your PC back at home, from wherever you happen to be, from OneDrive.com—even if you’re on a Mac.

There’s only a short list of fine-print footnotes:

• The PC back home has to be turned on and online.

  

  Figure 3-16. Here’s how you tell Windows which folders you want synced with your online OneDrive.
  Top: Right-click the OneDrive icon () in the system tray. (If you don’t see it, it may be hidden. In that case, click the button in the system tray to see the hidden icons—including OneDrive. You can right-click it right there in the balloon.) From the shortcut menu, choose Settings.
  Middle: The OneDrive Settings dialog box appears. On the Account tab, select the “Choose folders” button.
  Bottom: At this point, Windows displays a list of all the folders on your OneDrive. Turn off the checkboxes of folders you don’t want copied to your PC.
  The first time you turn off a checkmark, Windows warns you that your local (PC) copy will be deleted. Only the Internet copy will live on. From now on, you can keep some folders synced with your PC, and some only online, safely tucked away on your OneDrive in the sky.

• The remote PC has to be running Windows 7 or later. (And if it’s Windows 7 or 8, it has to have the OneDrive app installed and open. You can download it from OneDrive.com.)

Turn on Fetch

Here’s how you prepare the home PC for remote invasion:

1. Right-click the OneDrive icon in the system tray.

   See Figure 3-16, top.

2. From the shortcut menu, choose Settings.

   The OneDrive Settings dialog box appears (Figure 3-16, middle).

3. On the Settings tab, turn on “Let me use OneDrive to fetch any of my files on this PC.” Make sure “Start OneDrive automatically when I sign in to Windows” is also turned on. Click OK.

   And that’s it! You can now tap into everything on that PC from the road, as shown in Figure 3-17; read on.

Figure 3-17. Here’s the online copy of your OneDrive contents. It may be a little clunkier than working on the desktop, but you have full command here: copy, rename, delete, move into new folders, and so on.
From any Mac or PC in the world, you can explore the contents of a PC back home (that’s turned on and online). Just double-click a folder to “drill down” into your stuff.

Sharing Files from OneDrive

There’s one more fantastic feature awaiting on your OneDrive: The ability to send huge files—files that are much too big for email—to other people.

Technically, you’re not really sending them the files; you’re sending them a link to the files. But the effect is the same: With one click, your colleague can download a file or folder from your OneDrive, no matter how huge it is.

Share a file or folder from the desktop

When you right-click a file or folder on your OneDrive (on your computer), the shortcut menu offers a long list of handy features. The one you want is “Share a OneDrive link”; see Figure 3-18.

Figure 3-18. The “Share a OneDrive link” command copies a long web address to your Clipboard, ready to paste into an email message, post on Flickr, share on Twitter, or whatever. When your fans click that link, the selected file or folder begins downloading instantly—no password required.

NTFS Compression

Windows 10, since you asked, requires a hard drive that’s formatted using a software scheme called NTFS. It’s a much more modern formatting scheme than its predecessor, something called FAT32—and among its virtues is, you guessed it, NTFS compression.

This compression scheme is especially likable because it’s completely invisible. Windows automatically compresses and decompresses your files, almost instantaneously. At some point, you may even forget you’ve turned it on. Consider:

• Whenever you open a compressed file, Windows quickly and invisibly expands it to its original form so you can edit it. When you close the file again, Windows instantly recompresses it.

• If you send compressed files (via disk or email, for example) to a PC whose hard drive doesn’t use NTFS formatting, Windows once again decompresses them, quickly and invisibly.

• Any file you copy into a compressed folder or disk is compressed automatically. (If you only move it into such a folder from elsewhere on the disk, however, it stays compressed or uncompressed—whichever it was originally.)

There’s only one downside to all this: You don’t save a lot of disk space using NTFS compression (at least not when compared with zip compression, described in the next section). Even so, if your hard drive is anywhere near full, it might be worth turning on NTFS compression. The space you save could be your own.

Compressing files, folders, or disks

To turn on NTFS compression, right-click the icon for the file, folder, or disk whose contents you want to shrink; from the shortcut menu, choose Properties. Proceed as shown in Figure 3-19.

Tip:

To compress an entire hard drive, the steps in Figure 3-19 are even simpler. Just right-click the drive’s icon (in your This PC window); choose Properties; and turn on “Compress this drive to save disk space.” Click OK.

Figure 3-19. In the Properties dialog box for any file or folder, click Advanced. Turn on “Compress contents to save disk space,” and then click OK. For a folder, Windows offers to compress all the files and folders inside this one, too.

Many Windows veterans wind up turning on compression for the entire hard drive, even though it takes Windows several hours to do the job. (If you plan to go see a movie while Windows is working, though, wait until the appearance of the first message box letting you know about some “open file” that can’t be compressed; then click Ignore All. A few files will still be uncompressed when you get back from the cineplex, but at least you won’t have had to stay home, manually clicking to dismiss every “open file” complaint box.)

When Windows is finished compressing files, their names appear in a different color, a reminder that Windows is doing its part to maximize your disk space.

Note:

If the files don’t change color, somebody—maybe you—must have turned off the “Show encrypted or compressed NTFS files in color” option (see “Compressing Files and Folders”).

Zipped Folders

NTFS compression is ideal for freeing up disk space while you’re working at your PC. But as soon as you email your files to somebody else or copy them to a flash drive, the transferred copies bloat right back up to their original sizes.

Fortunately, there’s another way to compress files: Zip them. If you’ve ever used Windows before, you’ve probably encountered .zip files. Each one is a tiny little suitcase, an archive, whose contents have been tightly compressed to keep files together, to save space, and to transfer them online faster (see Figure 3-20). Use this method when you want to email something to someone, or when you want to pack up a completed project and remove it from your hard drive to free up space.

Figure 3-20. Top: A Zip archive looks just like an ordinary folder—except for the tiny little zipper.
Bottom: Double-click one to open its window and see what’s inside.
The Size, Compressed Size, and Ratio columns tell you how much space you’ve saved. (JPEG and GIF graphics usually don’t become much smaller than they were before zipping, since they’re already compressed formats. But word processing files, program files, and other file types reveal quite a bit of shrinkage.)