Searching Specific Windows XP My Documents Files

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Gerard Mainardi. Today we're going over how to organize your documents in Windows XP. Remember Windows XP is copyright to the Microsoft Cooperation and I'm not affiliated with the Microsoft Cooperation. Now we're getting near the end of this series so we're going to get into a few advanced techniques for document handling. The first one we're going to do is document searching. Let's say you're trying to find something. You know it's somewhere on your computer. You're positive but you can't remember where you put it. It's not organized in your documents yet. You've got to sort of find it. Let's take a look at how we can do that. You see my computer desktop. What you want to is go up to "Start". Go down here to "Search". This brings up the search. Let's say we want to find a document here. So we have pictures, music, video and documents. So we know we want documents. So click on that. Now the part where for the document name, we don't know. Let's just say we want to find all the text files that we have scattered around our hard drive. The way to do this is put a star. That's an asterisk by holding down Shift and hitting eight. Star dot text. T-X-T. That pulls up all of your text files. You can easily go and find your common abbreviations for things. Word Documents are "doc". D-O-C, doc, star dot doc. Text files are star dot T-X-T. Anytime you want to pull up everything you use the star. Now, let's take a look here. What happens? You go down. You hit search. It starts pulling up all of the different things, all over our computer and here are all of our text files. Wow, geez look at all of these. Tons and tons so let's hit stop. It's going to take forever. There are thousands of text files on your computer. Just like before, in "My Documents" itself. Right click, free space, view, details. Ok, now we're looking at this good. We can see everything we have here and just like before, we can go through and organize it just like we want. Let's hit name to sort by name and now that we have all these sorted in name order I can look down. Let's see what I find. Oh ok, here's what I was looking for, the fees that I paid for some products before. Now, however, let's say I didn't find exactly what I wanted. Let's try to finish, let's finish the search. Let's do another one. Go up to "Start". Go down to "Search" as shown. Now, documents again. Let's say you know some of the file names this time. Let's go down here and use "Advanced Search Options". You can choose when you think it was last accessed, last time it was modified, all or part of the document name. Hmmm, you know I was looking for my Windows Guide here. So let's type in Windows Guide and search for it. Let's give it a second and see what happens here. Searching. Searching. Ah, here we go. The Windows User Guide I was looking for. As you can see, it's here in "C Games". I don't know how it got in my games folder but let's get it out of there. Go up to "Start". Go over open your "My Documents". So you have these two windows side by side. Let's make a new folder here. Right click. Go to new, folder, guides. Remember you have to keep these things very organized. Organization is the utmost key. Go back over. Just grab your Windows User Guide file here. Drag it over. Let go and now you've copied it over. There you go. Just as easy as that. And that's how you find files."