How many times has someone asked you for a bit of information and it’s taken you ages to find it? Don't worry, it's a common problem. We are deluged with digital information in the modern office; you probably have over 1GB of emails in your mailbox, and analysts believe you’ll send and receive more than 4.3GB of data in a year. And it’s not stopping, with the estimated growth rate of business emails at 25-30% per year. There are a number of problems this causes your business, but the most immediate one to the user is how hard it is to find anything.
You’d think that there would be a more efficient way to search your files and emails, as computers are supposed to be productivity tools. And of course, there is, and it’s free. For any Microsoft Windows user, there’s Windows Search. This tools ‘indexes’ your files and Microsoft Outlook emails, so you can search them more easily. The software can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/getitnow.mspx, and it’s very easy to install (and Windows Vista SP1 users already have it installed by default).
So how does it work? You just click the Start button, and in the box at the bottom of the menu bar where it says ‘Start search’ type in whatever you are searching for (in Windows XP the search box is in the tool bar on the right, next to your system tray).
That works pretty well, and you should see results in 2-3 seconds. But you can really target your search, and get the data you wanted more quickly, by using the advanced search syntax, and it’s not that difficult. The full help guide to the search syntax can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/winfamily/desktopsearch/choose/tipsandtricks.mspx, but typical examples of the tricks I find more useful are;
- from: director@customer.com - this will find everything received by you FROM this address, including files that person has attached to emails. You can also do from: customer.com and it will find emails from anyone at that company (or domain).
- ext: pdf - this will find files with that extention only, so for example "user manual" ext:pdf will find all Acrobat files with the words "user manual" in.
Read the help, and you'll find you can combine these search terms to really nail down that elusive email (for example, from: salesman@supplier.com, sent: last month, containing the word "discount"!).
All this costs nothing, takes seconds, and could save you hours a week in fruitless searches; leaving you free to do your job, instead of your computer's job. Next time, I'll look at how you can deploy this technology on your server, so everyone can search shared files just as easily.
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