Windows 7 desktop search wildcards

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Learn more. Windows 7 Wildcard Expansion Ask Question. Asked 8 years, 7 months ago. Active 8 years ago. Viewed times. Is this a bug in Windows 7 or is my computer infected with a virus? Volume in drive D has no label. The result, we often have a vague idea where a particular file is but no exact clue how to find it. The nice thing about AQS is you can quickly slice your way through that clutter and narrow down your search to a few select files.

These tools include Boolean operators, date operators, and wildcards. Boolean allows you to combine search operators to narrow or broaden your results. For example, you can constrain a search with NOT. For example, you could search for all image files but NOT bitmap files. On the other hand, you could search for music files OR image files, meaning that your search will return results with both file kinds.

You can actually create a search using only Boolean. That should be pretty easy to understand. The best thing about Boolean is that it works best when combined with AQS search parameters. You can also find certain file types using Boolean properties. They are most useful such as when searching through Outlook, which is beyond the scope of this series. We described how to use Boolean to return results based on dates, either before or after a certain date or between two dates.

You can actually take this quite a bit further and use relative date and day values. This should be pretty easy to understand. Then again, knowing the relative date values can ultimately help you cut a few corners and save time. Also, remember you can further refine your results by using other search operators such as titles and keywords.

But if we combine the two search operators, we see how quickly we can narrow down our results to 52 items:. So, to sum up, you can use Boolean to find files by date following a number of methods. Using an asterisk allows you to replace a string of text. You could open each folder and sort the contents by its type in the details view.

Obviously, trying to find one particular. Simply, the wildcard? When you use AQS, you can narrow your searches using four parameters. You can use AQS to search locations such as specific folder or you can query databases such as Microsoft Outlook data files. These are known as file stores. Use AQS to search for kinds of files, which can be anything such as documents, image files, spreadsheets, and more. File kinds are one of the more frequently-used parameters you will employ when conducting proper searches.

In the above screenshot, we see the properties sheet for an mp3. On it we see the type of file it is, its location, size, and dates created, modified, and accessed. For example, in the case of our mp3, we can also search for bit rate, artists, genre, album name, and more. You type in a search filter to limit what files and folders are displayed. This allows us to do much more powerful searches and replacements. The software adds an input to the shell context menu to look for the chosen folders, effortlessly.

Once the software is launched, it lets you customize the search function or restoration feature in multiple methods. Finding files that other search engines miss. Agent Ransack is a free software program for finding files on your PC or network drives. Listary is a revolutionary search utility for Windows that makes finding your files and launching applications blazing fast, for casual and power users alike! With just a few clicks you can quickly and easily:.