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WINDOWS 8.1 SEARCH FOR TEXT IN FILES WINDOWS
It also has some functions you might remember from old versions of Windows you've used. Also like a web search, you can get an exact match by "using quotes in the search" around Welcome to our community.įor the most part, the little search box in the File Explorer works a lot like the search box when searching the internet. Hi whistler318, I see this is your first post here. Sometimes doing that has revealed that I hadn't reallyĬorrectly expressed what I was trying to do before the UI syntax was converted to the query syntax which is passed to the search engine. Fortunately I realized that one important file I wanted included in those results was missing, so I changed the search to name:~~notes and found a whole lot more that I otherwise would have missed.Īnother tip I can give is that I have found it very useful to use the Saved Search feature, not just to save a search but also to be able to inspect it to find out how my query has been interpreted.
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Name) and stupidly only searched for name:notes at first. For example I recently tried to find all my Notes files (e.g. Fortunately name:~~ seems to do the same thing and that's what I use frequently. Ctrl-F in IE) for that character (~) in that document to get an overview of how it is used. I imagine that you would be particularly interested in how the tilde character (~) is used in modifying search terms, so do a find (e.g. To optimize my queries even more than that, so have had to master the rest of the patterns available in the search UI query syntax. However, since my machine is apparently so low power (or perhaps so filled with junk) I have had to learn how Anyway, I am also used to typing name: (at least). Up then? Hint: pay particular attention to what is hidden under the Other properties menu. For example, I always start searches from Win-E with Ctrl-e. Shawn has already pointed you to the discoverable part but I suspect you had to be a keyboard user before to realize how readily discoverable they are. You mean the "discoverable UI" was not intuitive for you?
WINDOWS 8.1 SEARCH FOR TEXT IN FILES HOW TO
I have spent a lot of time trying to find instructions on how to use the search function in File Explorer, and I would appreciate someone's helping me locate such instructions, assuming they even exist.
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