Improved productivity
With both the Windows Vista basic interface and Windows Aero, you can quickly find and organise the information on your desktop, helping to keep you on track and raising your level of productivity. With the innovative storage system of Windows Vista, you can now ‘tag’ your files with properties that are relevant to how you think about those files. You can then run more targeted searches and create personalised views of the search results without worrying about where the files are stored on your PC.
Search Folders
New to Windows Vista are Search Folders, which are searches that run instantly when you click them. Windows Vista comes with several preconfigured Search Folders, like Recent Documents – which instantly shows you all the recently used documents on your computer – and All Attachments, which shows you all the files on your computer that are email attachments.
New to Windows Vista, Search Folders collect all your related files into preconfigured folders or custom folders that you create.
You can also create and save your own Search Folders. For example, you could design a search for all documents authored by ‘John’ that contain the word ‘project’ somewhere within them. You can then save this search, under ‘John Project’, directly to the Document Explorer as a Search Folder. Now, any time you click this saved Search Folder, the search runs and the view is populated with the results in a split second. As you add files to your computer that are authored by ‘John’ and contain the word ‘project’, they will automatically show up in the saved Search Folder, regardless of where those files are located on your PC.
Instant Search
With a new tool in Windows Vista called Instant Search, you're never more than a few keystrokes away from whatever you're looking for. Instant Search is integrated throughout Windows Vista, so all you have to do is type a file name, a keyword, or even text contained within a file into an Instant Search field to see fast, pinpointed, organised results. Instant Search is also contextual – it optimises its results based on your current activity, whether it's searching for applets in the Control Panel, for music files in Windows Media Player, or searching all your files and applications in the Start menu.
Instant Search boxes help you find what you need when you need it.
From the Start menu
Instant Search is located on the Windows Vista Start menu, so you can find practically anything on your PC with as-fast-as-you-can-type performance. To find a specific file, email message, contact, event, application or Internet Favourite, simply open the Start menu and begin typing in the Instant Search field. As you type, Windows Vista instantly finds and displays matching items, whether they are applications, Internet Favourites, documents, media, contacts, calendar events or email messages.
Search your entire computer with Instant Search found in the new Start menu.
From within Explorers and the Control Panel
Instant Search is featured prominently in the upper-right corner of every Explorer, including Documents Explorer, Music Explorer, Pictures Explorer and the new Search Explorer. Just as on the Start menu, you just have to type a few letters before the most relevant results are quickly displayed. If the results aren't what you're looking for, Instant Search also provides easy access to tools that can help you design more specific searches, or you can search the Internet using your search provider of choice.
Instant Search also appears in the upper-right corner of the Control Panel in Windows Vista. Type a word or phrase associated with the task you want to accomplish, and the Control Panel will filter down to the most relevant choices available to complete the task. For example, typing ‘change screen resolution’ into the Instant Search field will quickly display all controls related to changing the resolution of your monitor.
By using Instant Search in the Control Panel, you can search for information related to a task that you need to accomplish, such as ‘changing screen resolution’, ‘adding a printer’, or ‘connecting to the Internet’.
You'll also find Instant Search in the new Windows Photo Gallery and Windows Media Player. Anywhere you see the search field, just start typing and you'll easily find what you're looking for quickly, consistently and within the context of where you're searching.
Using Instant Search in Windows Media Player will return organised results related to your music and video files.
Advanced Search Pane
For more detailed searches within an Explorer, you can use the advanced filter pane to design a search with multiple search criteria.
With the advanced Search Pane, you can add multiple criteria to your searches.
For example, you can choose to search a specific location or for a particular content type, such as documents, email messages or media. You can also add additional filters, including keywords and date ranges. When you've designed a particularly useful search, it's easy to save it as a new Search Folder so later you can instantly repeat that search just by clicking on it.
If you connect external, stand-alone hard drives to your Windows Vista-based PC for storage, backup or archival purposes, the contents of these drives can also be displayed in your search results. Simply add the hard drives to your search index, and when you create a new Search Folder, the contents of the drives will be included in your results.
You can add external hard drives to your search index so that all of your searches include results from the content stored on these drives.
Personalised views of your files
The powerful Explorers in Windows Vista extend the benefits of desktop searches to the next level by combining instant searches and the ability to automatically organise content based on file properties like file names, file types, author or descriptive keywords (or ‘tags’) that you can associate with your files.
For example, if you want to see all of your documents organised by author, the Documents Explorer can help you search your PC and automatically arrange all documents according to who authored them. Or, if you prefer to see files arranged by type – documents, spreadsheets or presentations – the Documents Explorer can instantly sort and display the results this way as well.
This Document Explorer view shows files sorted alphabetically by file name and grouped by who created them.
This Music Explorer view shows the album art as well as the name of the album.
The real power of these new features is that they allow you to organise and view your files in countless, flexible ways. For example, you may have a photo from your holiday, taken at a zoo, with a tiger in it. With Windows XP, you store that photo in a specific place on your PC-maybe a folder called ‘Holiday’. With Windows Vista, you can tag that photo with three keywords: Holiday, Zoo and Tiger. Later, you can easily locate this photo by using any of those tags. More importantly, typing a keyword like ‘Tiger’ in the search field will not only yield that one photo, but will generate a dynamic view of all the photos that have been tagged with the Tiger keyword-no matter where they are on your PC. Typing ‘Zoo’ in the search field gives you a view of that same picture, this time alongside all the other Zoo-tagged pictures you may have previously taken.
Using the Photos Explorer in Windows Vista, you can search for specific photos using keywords (tags) that you add to your images describing the scene.
Enhanced column header controls
Enhanced column header controls take advantage of the extensive use of file properties in Windows Vista. With the enhanced column header controls, you can more easily manage the large numbers of files that may be shown in an Explorer or within your Search Results. The new column header controls have drop-down menus, which can display all of the values across any of the columns of information associated with your files.
Enhanced column header controls enable you to customise the view of your content in Windows Vista Explorers.
For example, choosing the Type column header control will display a list of all the different types of files in your folder. Using simple check boxes, you can choose only files of the specific type you want to see. Selecting HTML document and XLS file types will filter out all of the other file types on the screen leaving only those files that are HTML documents or spreadsheets.
Stack and Group By views
The new column header controls also feature two new views that you can use to browse your content. The Stack view displays your content stacked by the values in a specific column. For example, if you select the Authors column header and choose to stack by author, all of your files currently in view will automatically be rearranged into stacks organised by the author's name.
The Stack view displays your files stacked by a specific value associated with your files, such as author name, date, application or keyword.
These stacks behave like traditional folders, so you can click to open them and see all of the items located in that stack. Unlike traditional folders, however, stacks have no physical location on your computer. In a sense, they are virtual views of your content. More importantly, if a file has two authors (for example, a document was authored by Tim and Clare), that file is included the stacks for both Tim and Clare, providing you with the ultimate flexibility in how you find and organise your files.
The Group By view is similar to the Stack view, but it takes the content files and places them into groups according to the values of a particular column header. Grouping your files by author will give you a more granular view of which documents belong to which author.
The Group By view displays your files in groups according to the values of a particular column header.
Tagging your files
The powerful new search and organisation features in Windows Vista make extensive use of the properties (called metadata or keywords) associated with the files you store on your PC to provide you with dynamic ways to view your content. These properties can include things like the date a file was created, the author of a file, names of people who appear in a photo, or the application that was used to create the file.
For example, Microsoft Office automatically saves certain information on documents that you create, such as your name and the date the document was created. When you add music to your PC, information such as song name, album and artist are added to the actual music file. With Windows Vista, some of the most useful pieces of information are the keywords that you apply to your saved files. Tagging your files with keywords is fast and easy, and can be applied to a single file or to a group of files all at once.
Adding tags using the Details Pane
To easily add a property to a file, select the file and click the Edit link in the Details Pane. This opens the Properties dialogue box, where you can easily add or edit file properties. Many of the entry fields in this box support auto-completion, making it even easier to add properties. You can also tag an entire group of files at once – just select multiple files and add a property to the Properties dialogue box. And if you want to make sure that no one sees your personalised properties and keywords when you email a file or post a file to a website, Windows Vista includes a cleaning tool that helps you erase those properties from the file quickly and easily.
By clicking the Edit link in the Details Pane, you can use the Properties dialogue box to easily add or edit the file properties.
Adding tags when opening or saving a file
Windows Vista features a new, common file dialogue box for opening and saving files. With applications that use this control, like Office 2007, you can use all of the innovative new searching and tagging features when you open and save files. To add properties when saving a file, simply enter the properties directly into the Details Pane and they are automatically added to the file as you save it.
With applications that use the common file dialogue box, you can tag your files when you open or save them.
