Windows 7 demo: Search tools

METALLIC SOUND

>> Ed Bott: I'm Ed Bott from ZDNet, and today I'm going to take a closer look at the search tools in Windows 7 and show you how you can use them to make your digital life a little more organized. You'll find search boxes throughout Windows 7. The most useful one is at the bottom of the start menu. Type the first few letters of a program's name to jump straight to it. You can also look for control panel items here. Speaking of control panel, there's a search box there, too. If the fonts on your screen are too small to read, just type "bigger." You don't need to know what that feature is called officially or where it's located. You can also search for email messages and files from the start menu. For instance, I know I saved details of my hotel reservation for Rome in a Word document. It only takes a few letters to find it. There's a search box in Windows Explorer too, in the upper-right corner. You can type a keyword here to instantly find any document that contains that word. One new Windows Explorer feature that's especially helpful when searching is the button that lets you toggle the preview pane on and off. A new feature called "search builder" lets you narrow down results using the mouse. Click in the search box to see which file attributes you can use to build your search. In this library, I can filter the search so it includes only photos in JPEG format -- no movie files or folders -- taken in January 2009 and rated five stars. pause In fact, one of the coolest ways you can narrow a search is to use the "date modified" field. If you know roughly when you saved a file, you can drill down through the calendar by date. Pick a specific date, a month, a year, a decade, or a range of dates. You can also narrow your search by type, by size, or by any available attribute. In the next video, I'll look at Windows XP mode which helps deal with incompatible, older programs. For ZDNet, I'm Ed Bott.

METALLIC SOUND

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====