File under: Software I Can NOT Live Without
How much time have you wasted looking for files on your PC? If it’s more than a minute, stop what you’re doing and go to http://www.voidtools.com/ and get a copy of the Everything Search Engine. Sorry Mac users, it only works on Windows machines. And it’s FREE!
What it does it quickly index all the names of all the files and folders on your machine and let you search by any part of any name in any order. Then it pops up the results. And damn is it fast.
Suppose I want to find a presentation I did last July and I don’t really remember where I put it or exactly what I called it but I know I named it something with the date and it was a PowerPoint, but I don’t know if it was the old (.ppt) format or the newer (.pptx) format. I can just type in “July .ppt” or “.ppt July” or even just “jul” and it finds all files and folders with any of that in the name anywhere.
Everything Changes Everything
So first of all you can stop naming your files with cryptic appreviations. But you probably already knew that. But ever since the days of DOS files have been organized in a hierarchy if you wanted to find them again. Something like:
TAXES
|__ 2012
|__ 2013
|__ Returns
|__Corporate
|__ Personal
|__ 1040.pdf
But since you can search by name it makes more sense to give files better names like 2013 Personal Tax Return 1040.pdf in the above example. That way it’s easier to remember some part of the name when it’s time to search. Plus I can put it anywhere. Kind of like how Google lets you find an email no matter what label you gave it.
Just Set it And Forget it!
You can just install it, give it a minute or two to index and go. OR you can tweak it so it only indexes certain drives, or puts its index file in a certain location and you can exclude certain folders so it won’t index your backup folders for example.
But Wait! There’s More!
Here are some of the extra Everything tricks that I use a lot:
Sort by location, date, or size
The list of items in the search return defaults to alphabetical but you can click on a column to sort by location, date or size. This helps when there are lots of files with similar names.
Right Click options
When you right click on a name in the list one choice it gives you is “Open Path” which opens the folder that the file is in. This is handy if you keep related files in the same folder.
Also you can “Copy Full Name to Clipboard.” This copies the entire path (starting with the drive letter) to the clipboard so you can past it into a document or email and find that file again.
Those are the things I use all the time with this software, but it does many more tricks that I haven’t bothered to learn. It’s the first thing I install when I get a new computer. I can’t live without it. Did I mention it’s free? But if you love it half as much as I do, please donate. http://www.voidtools.com/donate/
Great for use in a company where people don’t always save files to the right location.
