Page 196 - Windows 10 May 2019 Update The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box

It’s at times like these you’ll be grateful for Windows’ little-known

criterion searches. These are syntax tricks that help you create narrower,
more targeted searches. All you have to do is prefix your search query with
the criterion you want, followed by a colon.

An example is worth a thousand words, so several examples should save an

awful lot of paper. You can type these codes into the search box in an
Explorer window (they don’t work in the main search box):

name: big finds only documents with “big” in their names.
Windows ignores anything with that term inside the file.

Note

These searches work with or without a space after the colon—either ”name: big” or
“name:big” is fine.

tag: crisis finds only icons with “crisis” as a tag—not as part of
the title or contents.

created: 7/25/19 finds everything you wrote on July 25, 2019.
You can also use modified: today or modified: yesterday, for that
matter. Or don’t be that specific. Just use modified: July or

modified: 2019.

You can use symbols like < and >, too. To find files created since
yesterday, you could type created: >yesterday.

Or use two dots to indicate a range. To find all the email you got in
the first two weeks of March 2019, you could type received:
3/1/2019..3/15/2019. (That two-dot business also works to specify

a range of file sizes, as in size: 2 MB..5 MB.)