About finding files
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You can use the Search command in Microsoft Office XP to find files wherever you work: on your computer hard drive, your local network, your Microsoft Outlook mailbox, and your network places. You can also find e-mail messages, meetings, and other information in your Outlook mailbox. Search provides two methods of finding files: basic search and advanced search.
Basic search is the most comprehensive way to search for files, Outlook items, and Web pages. You can find files that contain specified text in the title, contents, or properties. You can also specify where to look for files and the types of files to search for.
Advanced search is more specific. You use it to find files based on their properties. You do this by creating queries, which are sets of one or more rules that must be true for a file to be found. An example of a query is "author is (exactly) Dan." This specifies that the files you are searching for should contain only the text "Dan" as the author property.
When you use Search, the Search task pane is displayed on the right side of the page. Each Office application can have its own instance of the Search task pane. However, the search results are available from any application. For example, if you search for files of all types from Microsoft Word, and you open a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet from the search results list, the search results are also displayed in the Excel Search task pane so that you can continue using them.
As soon as you start a search, the Search task pane begins listing the names of files it finds. Files are displayed separately by location: your computer, your mailbox, and your network places.
From the results list, you can take many actions on the files you find, such as:
- Viewing a file's properties
- Opening a file
- Viewing a file in a Web browser
- Creating a new document based on a file
- Copying a hyperlink to a file to the Office Clipboard
Speeding up search with fast searching
Fast searching extracts information from files and organizes it in a way that makes the files quicker and easier to find. The fast searching index is updated when your computer is idle.
On Microsoft Windows 2000, fast searching uses the built-in Windows 2000 Indexing Service. On other Windows platforms, you can install a similar indexing service, Support For Fast Searching, during Office setup.
If you're running Office on Windows 2000, you enable fast searching support from the Windows Search task pane. On Windows 98 and Windows NT, you enable it from the Basic Search task pane.
The Basic Search task pane displays a note if fast searching is not installed. If fast searching is installed, its status — enabled or disabled — is displayed.
Building more complex searches using conditions and values
Conditions are limitations you set on the value of a file property in an advanced search to make it more specific. Each type of property has a set of relevant conditions that advanced search displays automatically. For example, if the property is a date, advanced search displays, among others, the following condition choices: "today," "tomorrow," "yesterday."
Some conditions do not require a value following them. In the example "Last Modified yesterday," no additional value is needed because the condition "yesterday" gives advanced search all the necessary information.
Some conditions do require a value following them. For example, the condition "equals" always requires a value following it, which you provide when you configure the search.
Searching from the Open dialog box
You can search for a file using a basic search or an advanced search while using the Open dialog box. As in the Search task pane, results are displayed separately by location. Along with opening a file, you can view its properties.