Home Office: A Cure for File-and-Forget

By Steve Bass, PCW Print May 21, 2001 1:00 AM

"Do you remember that cute Fourth of July anagram you created last year?" My wife was referring to a document I created in Microsoft Word five years ago. Yep, I remembered it and had even saved it--somewhere. If I depended on Windows' file finders, I might spend hours looking for it, but I recently discovered two handy search tools that can track down practically any document stored on my system in just seconds. Folks, if you need to find things on your hard drive, you're going to love this column.

When you're looking for a file on a PC, you probably think of Find, the freebie in Windows 98 (it's called Search in Windows Me/2000). Find is okay for locating files and folders by name, but for digging into a file's content, it's the pits. The reason? Find has to scour through every file in your search request, and because it has no way to index the file's content, subsequent searches are no faster.

There are a slew of tricks to make Find work better. Say you often do the same search, such as looking for every movie file you downloaded in the last week. Why not save the search parameters as a Desktop shortcut?

Press F3 while you're on the Desktop, enter *.avi in the Named field (or in 'Search for files or folders named' in Me and 2000), and scroll to My Computer in the 'Look in' field. Click the Date tab (or check Date in Me and 2000), select Find all files (in Windows 98), choose Modified from the drop-down list (or files Modified in Me and 2000), and choose during the previous 7 days (or in the last 7 days in Me and 2000). Now click File, Save Search to create a Desktop icon that performs the search whenever you double-click it.

Neat, eh? I'll describe other searching tricks in a future Home Office online newsletter.

Super Search Add-Ons

Lightning-fast searches are easy if you use a program that indexes the words within documents. You search the index, and the index points to the document.

Find Fast, the free search tool that comes with Microsoft Office, uses indexing, but it can search only for Microsoft Office and HTML documents. Try Find Fast just to see how quick indexed searches can be (enable it in the Control Panel), but disable its automatic indexing to keep it from eating into your processing power.

With a little digging, I uncovered two search programs that will knock the socks off your docs: DtSearch's DtSearch Desktop 6 ($167 street), and SilverLakeTech.com's $40 PC Data Finder 5.5.

DtSearch Desktop's searches are the quicker of the two. The program's interface is intuitive and austere, and its file viewers work as advertised. There's no folderol--DtSearch does extensive, intricate searching accurately and efficiently. It lets me search using Boolean strings ('Paul AND O'Neill NOT Yankees', for example, to find references to the Secretary of the Treasury but not to the baseball player), and I can view practically any file, including .pdfs, zipped files--even my ancient DOS WordStar and WordPerfect files.

DtSearch Desktop's background indexing is fast: It took just 35 minutes to cover about 40,000 files--indexing roughly 336,000 words--or 384MB of data (yes, I'm a pack rat). The downside is the steep cost. But if you need a superb search tool, get DtSearch Desktop.

PC Data Finder does a good job of searching for and viewing files, but its interface is awkward and unintuitive, mostly because it strays from the Windows standard. Viewing files is easy enough, but you can't perform a Copy command from the program's viewer window, for example. Nonetheless, if you do more than an occasional search, PC Data Finder will serve you well.

Both DtSearch Desktop and PC Data Finder are compatible with Windows 2000, 98, and Me, and trial versions are available at our Downloads library.

Next month? Cool tools for Web searching. By the way, I found the anagram doc in less than a second--slightly faster than it will take you to find it.

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