Three of the four file searches in Finders Keepers™
are "non-technical": Plain-text, Sound-alike, and
Approximate. In the first two of these, you don't have to set
anything; in the Approximate search, all you set is how many errors, or
discrepancies, you want to allow in the spelling--usually 1 or 2.
Besides direct file searches, you can use indexed text retrievals:
that may sound technical, but it simply means you can look for a word in
an index of your files instead of searching the files themselves.
Yes. Use the Sound-alike search, which will find names that
sound like whatever guess you make at the spelling. Or use the
Approximate search, which will allow for errors in spelling. Of course,
if you are technical at all, you know that Regular Expression searches can find variations in
spelling.
First, type in "John Doe" and click the Find button.
Then, in the Results window, double-click on any file name or any found
line: the file will open in the default viewer you picked in
Options | Set Options | Results | Viewers. A second method is to
click on the navigator buttons atop the Results window, which can take
you forward or backward through all your findings. A third method
is to right-click in the Results window for a local menu with several
choices for opening a file.
Since we don't know what your occupation is, we'll give you broad
answers to give you an idea:
1) Keep search results so you don't have to search for the same
thing again the next time you forget where it was. For instance,
find all the files that have your key word "payroll" in them;
save the results as "Payroll Files I Keep Looking For" or any
name you choose. The next time you forget, open this file and
double-click on any line in the Results window to open the respective
file.
2) Keep search results in order to study or work on all the
found files later, overseeing and launching them from a central
place. (Central places in computer swamp are good things.)
3) Keep search results because later you are going to use File
| Copy Selected Files... to take your found files to class, court, or
meeting on a disk, or to send your found files to your portable
computer.
After a search, click the main menu selection:
Edit | File List | Take from Results
This causes the program to take the found files in Results as the
file list for the next search. Suppose you searched for
"animal" and found 100 files. Now you want to find
"small." To find it only in files found with
"animals," select Edit | File List | Take from
Results.
Yes. If you have no reason to search binary files, which
provide the gobbledygook, select "Auto-detect and skip binary"
under Options | Set Options | Find | Reading Files. The program
will then skip all files it detects to be binary. (If you are not
an IT professional, programmer, or daredevil, you probably do not
need to search binary files, which have file extensions such as
".exe" and ".dll".) To skip all files of
particular file extensions, go to Set Options | Exclude | Always Skip
Extensions. There, you can select or name the extensions to skip
during Find and Replace operations. Press F1 there for help.
Book Writer™
Book Writer, a word processor designed for writers instead of corporate word
processing, is in beta now. You can get a free download of it. But
there are no posted FAQs about it yet.
