Better search in Google, Word, Windows and more

Do you have many hundreds of files, such as photos and documents, stored locally and/or in the cloud? Then it is often quite a task to locate the desired files. These advanced search tips will help you search better.

Windows 10

Tip 01: Quick finder

Since the Cortana speech and search assistant is not yet available unless you set English as the display language for your Windows 10 installation, we will ignore this assistant in this article. Fortunately, there are other good search functions available. For example, it suffices to press the Windows start button and enter a few initial letters to see (default) apps, settings and documents appear whose name starts with the letters entered. By the way, you can also open this search panel by clicking the magnifying glass icon to the right of the start button. Right click this icon and choose To search if you want to hide the icon or replace it with a real search box.

If you prefer to search for (names of) folders, photos, videos or music, click on the corresponding icon in the search panel (in the 'creators update' of Windows, first select the option Filters).

Tip 02: Search criteria

The search function in the Windows start menu is especially useful if you want to quickly find names of files and apps. Sometimes you want to dig deeper and work with combined search criteria. Then you work better from Explorer. As soon as you click in the search box in the top right of Windows Explorer, the tab To search opened. It contains three interesting sections. In the section Location indicate where you want to search: on the entire PC, only in the current folder or also in the subfolders. In the Refine section you can activate all kinds of search filters: by date of modification (from Today until Last year), by file type (such as Image, Document and web history), by size (from Empty until gigantic) and some other properties, such as the file path or extension.

Tip 03: Search combinations

You can also simply select multiple criteria at the same time. As soon as you choose a search filter, Windows ensures that the correct syntax appears in the search box. For example, choose Size / Small and Modified on / This week then appears there size:small modified on:this week. Please note, choose a criterion from the section Other features, for example File extension, then will appear in the search box file extension: but you still have to complete this yourself with the desired extension (for example file extension:docx).

Unfortunately it is from the section refine not possible to select the same filter multiple times at the same time. If you want to do that anyway, you have to do this manually, preferably with the Boolean operators NOT, AND or OR (also NOT, AND and OR be accepted). Suppose you only want to find very small or small files whose name, properties and/or content contain the term Computer!Total, then the syntax becomes “computer!totalsize: (very small OR small). Note the double quotes to search for an exact phrase or phrase, on the operator OR – required in capital letters! – and on the parentheses to indicate that both terms belong to the filter size:.

Complex combinations of multiple search filters are also possible. For example, you want files that were last modified last year or this year, with the extensions docx or xlsx, but that don't contain both the search terms Android and iOS. This search could then look like this: NOT (android AND ios) changed on:(this year OR last year) type:(docx OR xlsx).

Complex combinations of multiple search filters are also possible

Tip 04 : Searches

If you regularly use the same search terms and filters, it can be useful to save those searches. On the tab To search can be found in the section Options already the Recent Searches back. But to make sure that a particular search query is saved, select here Save search. By default, the search query is copied as the name of the search file (.search-ms), but this is not mandatory. Once you have saved the search, you can pin that folder – by default, c:\users\searches – to the rubric from the context menu, for example Quick access (at the top of the navigation panel), so that you always have frequently used searches at hand.

Tip 05: Indexing

By default, Windows has a service running that stores the file names as well as the properties and file contents of some file types in an indexed list, making searches noticeably faster. Press Windows Key+R and enter services.msc to check whether the service, named Windows Search, is active. You can decide which disk locations are and are not indexed. To do this, open the tab To search in File Explorer and click Advanced Options / Change Indexed Locations. Press on the button Modify, by clicking the small arrow next to a drive letter you can browse through the various folders and place a check mark next to the desired items. Confirm with OK. Via the button Advanced you can click on the tab File types also determine whether Windows should index only the file names and properties or also the content. Of course, the latter only makes sense for 'readable' files.

MS Office (Word 2016)

Tip 06: Search in Word

If you want to quickly find a word or a piece of text in an open document in Word, you only have to press Ctrl+F and enter the desired search query in the appropriate box in the navigation panel. You will receive a piece of text for each result and you can navigate through the results list via the arrow buttons at the top left.

Handy, but quite limited. If you want more search options, open the tab Start and click on the arrow at the top right To search, after which you AdvancedSearch select to display a dialog box.

In the box Search you can of course search for keywords, but there is (much) more. For example, you can also search for a specific format, such as italicized words. To do this, press the button at the bottom left layout and choose you in this case Font style. Then you choose drawing style in front of Italics and confirm with OK. You will now notice that under the search box Format: Font: Italic is added. In a similar way you can now search for other formatting functions and styles – also combined.

Hotkey

Since Word 2010, the shortcut Ctrl+F no longer leads you to the advanced search function, but opens a simple search method in the Navigation pane. Would you rather have it different? Then open the menu File and choose Options. Go to the Customize ribbon section and click at the bottom left on To adjust, Bee Shortcut keys. Then click in the left panel on Home tab and in the right panel on the item EditSearch. Click in the box at Press new hotkey and press Ctrl+F. You will be notified that it has already been assigned to the navigation panel, click Assign to to make the adjustment. If you want to undo that afterwards, you link the shortcut to the item again NavPaneSearch.

Tip 07: Substitute function

Such a powerful search function is of course very useful. It becomes even more interesting when you know that you can easily replace the search results with other words or formatting functions. It is enough that you have the tab To replace opens. Just about the only difference with the tab To search is that there is the input box To replace has come through. Here you enter the keywords that match the keywords Search should be replaced. If you want to provide a replacement layout, first click the box Is replaced by and then go through the buttons More / Format looking for the desired formatting function. If you have added a wrong formatting function, you can remove it with the button no formatting.

For example, it is possible to replace all instances of the term Computer!Total in a document with Computer!Total in bold text (note the capitalization in our example). You first put a check in Identical upper/lower case letters, you type at To search to the text Computer!Total in and at To replace by you type Computer!Total.

Then select for the latter Format / Font / Bold. Confirm with OK and click Replace everything.

In addition to formatting functions, it is also possible to find and replace all kinds of special characters and text marks. For this you use the button Special. Strangely enough, you partly see other items here depending on whether you have placed a checkmark at Using wildcards (see also box). So experimenting yourself is the message.

You can also effortlessly replace search results with other words

Jokers & regex

Of course, the search and replace function in Word also supports the traditional wildcard characters, where a question mark (?) stands for one arbitrary character and an asterisk (*) stands for an unspecified number of arbitrary characters. If you look for tr??s, pride and tricks would be found. For example, a search term like tr*s would also bring up bunch, pride, tricks and something like lattice window. You must first put a check next to Using wildcards.

The latter also applies if you want to use regular expressions, regex for short. This syntax is so extensive and complex that we don't have the space to go into it here. We'll give you a simple example. Suppose you have thousands separated by a period and you prefer to replace it with a space (from 1,234,000 to 1,234,000). You can when you ([0-9]).([0-9]) fill in at Search: and \1^s\2 Bee Is replaced by. More examples, both for wildcards and regex, can be found here.

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