Restore XP-style search behavior?

[Puppy Breath]

Are the Excel sheets in an indexed location, like her Documents folder. If
so, it should be way easier and quicker to find them in Vista. Just click
the Start button, start typing

old navy

And click Old Navy.xls as soon as she sees it in the Start menu. Seems
unlikely that she'd have so many other file types named Old Navy that she'd
have to do any more than that. But if she did she could type something like

Old AND type:xls

into the search box on the Start menu. But it doesn’t seem likely she'd have
to bother.

When saving the Excel sheets she could add meta properties that better
define each file, then just search for the property value. It's much better
whether you're a beginner or an expert.

Going back to the old XP style would be a waste.Better to learn to take
advantage to the new way of doing things because it's much easier and much,
much quicker. Once you've learned how to work it.

 

[Puppy Breath]

Maybe you're right. But I created a picture named Old Navy Peacoat.jpg. I
created a Word document named Junk.docx with Old Navy Peacoat in the text
(not in the filename). I created a Word document named Old Navy
Peacoat.docx. I created an Excel worksheet named Book1.xlxs with Old Navy
Peacoat in a cell, and I created an Excel worsheet named Old Navy
Peacoat.xslsx.

When I type

old navy

in the Search box on the Start menu, I get all four. If I continue typing
and add type:xlsx as below:

old navy AND type:xlsx

I only get the two Excel sheets. Maybe that's not good enough, I don't know.
But the results were instant. No disk thrashing or waiting.

Personally, I'd probably put all those data in a database and get Excel out
of the picture altogether.




--

 

[Guest]

So I upgraded my own and my wife's workstations to Windows Vista.

So far I like a lot, however some things seem to be changed to make things
"easier" for the newbie, but more difficult for experts to be as effective as
they were under XP.

My current issue is with the file/folder search behavior. My wife used the
old behavior all the time where you specify the filename/wildcard that youare
looking for and then in a separate blank, she can specify the partial text
she is looking for in the filetype specified.

For example, she does a lot of Ebay posting and tracks her sales in Excel
files. She is used to hitting F3 in a folder to bring the search pane and
then putting *.xls in the filename box and "old navy" in the text within box.
This was very quick at retrieving the excel files that had a sale of an old
navy item. With Vista, there is just one blank where she can just type "old
navy". This can bring back the correct files, however it take more than 3
times as long because it is searching every file on a large shared disk
instead of limiting to the filetype. I cannot find a way to enable the
old-style multi-blank search.

Any suggestions?

-David

 

[Guest]

Do a search then click the help button. Choose Find a File or Folder, Tips
for Finding Files or Folders.

So (in your case use xls rather than txt)

txt "280"
or
*.txt "280"

or more formally

NAME:*.txt "280"

 

[Guest]

You missed the point completely.

The files are not named old navy.

They are named things like:

2006FALL_SET1.XLS
2006FALL_SET2.XLS
2006FALL_SET3.XLS

Inside those files are cells with the text like "Old Navy Pea Coat" and "Old
Navy Leather Jacket".

She is looking for any excel file that contains the words "old navy" in
them. She does not want to see files with old navy in the filename like
"OldNavyPeaCoat01.jpg". Other file types should not come up because she only
wants to find the excel files and she has so many images that they increase
the signal to noise ratio of the search results and make it more confusing to
*quickly* find what she is looking for.

The new search feature in Vista does eventually find the results, but it is
slower since these are always stored on the network and doesn't make sense
for indexing.

I will try the NAME:*.xls "old navy" method that someone else suggested.

I am a huge Vista fan, but the new search feature is counter-intuitive to
existing XP users and counter-productive if you know exactly what you want.
Allowing it to just spew all matching files and results when I know I can
reduce the search space by file extension is a step-down in quality. They
should have left the option to search eitehr the new way or the XP way.

-David