Jan's Files and Folders: Exercises

Exercise Win2-2: Find and Manage Files

Purpose: to meet the Find utility and to demonstrate that you can manage files and folders

What you will do:

Use Search to locate files based on the extension
Create folders and files
Move and rename
Do a screen capture print
Backup your files

Start with: & have finished Exercise Win2-1.

Look for Files

Open Explorer and create on your Class disk a new folder named bitmaps . Be sure the View in use is Details. Do NOT close Explorer.
Open the Start menu and...
In Win98 select Find. The Find All Files dialog appears.
You can do searches using one or a combination of the choices on the three tabs. Be sure the checkbox for Include subfolders is checked or the process will not check nested folders.

In WinXP select Search. The Search Companion dialog box appears. You will get an Internet Explorer window with the Search pane on the left. The Search button on the toolbar toggles this pane in and out of view. WinXP lets you search for just pictures, or just documents, or all files and folders.

You may not see the animated dog Rover if the preferences have been changed. At the bottom of the list is a choice to Turn off animated character. The link Change preferences lets you switch to another character in addition to other kinds of preferences.
In Windows Vista you don't need a dialog yet. Get ready to type in the Search box above the Start button.
Check out all of the choices for how to restrict your search.
To search for all files with the extension bmp...

In the tab Name & Location, in the textbox Named: type *.bmp (Be careful to type this exactly as written - an asterisk, a period, the letters b m p with no spaces.) In the Look in text box, drop the list and select drive C.
Select to search All files and folders and in the text box All or part of the file name, type *.bmp (Be careful to type this exactly as written - an asterisk, a period, the letters b m p with no spaces.) In the Look in text box, drop the list and select drive C. Click the Advanced options box and then in the box for Search system folders. There are some bitmap images in the Windows folder that we want to show up in the results.

In Windows Vista type in the Search box, *.bmp From the Search text box you will automatically be looking in all of the Indexed locations, which includes all of your user folders like Pictures, Documents, and Music.

The asterisk * is called a wildcard and stands for any number of characters. A question mark stands in for a single character. So if you search for ??.bmp , the results could include files with names like ad.bmp and my.bmp but would not show files like forest.bmp or f.bmp because they don't have the right number of letters.
Start the search process:
In Win98, click the button Find Now. This process can take quite a while if your hard disk is large. You may stop the process once the Windows folder has been checked.

Search results in Win98

In WinXP, click the button Search Now. As files are found, they are listed for you. This process can take quite a while if your hard disk is large. You may stop the process once the Windows folder has been checked. The default for WinXP is to show thumbnails for pictures. In Details view you can see a more files at once. You can click the Stop Search button in the left pane once the Windows folder has been searched.

Search results in WinXP -
with Search Companion (Thumbnails) and without Search Companion (Details)

In Windows Vista, press ENTER. The results from the Indexed locations appear very quickly above the Start button if it is a short list. But there are many more files than these! Click at the bottom of the menu on the link See all results. A new Search results window appears and gradually displays other files as Search looks in locations that were not indexed., including the Windows folder. (You can stop the search after it finishes with the Windows folder by clicking the button at the right end of the progress bar.)

If your results for Indexed locations was a long list, it may have opened up in a new window. To see "all results" is not as simple from here. Click the Advanced Search button at the upper right of the window, which opens the Search pane. Check the box for "include non-indexed, hidden, and system folders" and click on the Search button. Watch the folder names for where Search is looking. Once it has finished with the Windows folder, you can stop the search process by clicking the button . (If the search is taking a long time, you can change the search location to just the Windows folder by navigating through the Locations dialog.)

Search results in Windows Vista -
Indexed locations and All of Computer
When the search is finished, scroll the list of found files. What you see in this list will vary, depending on what programs have been installed on your computer. The illustrations show some files that are installed in the folder Windows.
You can do most file management tasks directly from the results window. This is so neat!

The three files shown in the illustration come with Win98, so they should be in your list somewhere, but probably not next to each other.
Under WinXP and Vista you will not see the files that came with Win98 unless you upgraded from an earlier version on Windows. Instead look for Blue Lace16.bmp, Prairie Wind.bmp, and Soap Bubbles.bmp. If you don't see any of these, use any three bmp files that you do find.

Copy Files: Send To

Select in the Files Found/Search Results window the three files Forest.bmp, Sandstone.bmp, Stitches.bmp or Blue Lace16.bmp, Prairie Wind.bmp, and Soap Bubbles.bmp (or whatever you found) and then right click on one of them.
From the popup menu select Send to (if it is available to you) and from the menu that cascades from it, select your removable drive. The selected files are copied to the root directory of the chosen drive (not in any of the folders).

Problem: No command Send to
Solution: Copy the files and paste them to your removable drive at the top level, called the root.
Do NOT close the Search window or Explorer. They need to be open for later steps.

Create folder, Save As

If necessary, switch to Explorer using ALT + TAB. Create a new folder bitmaps and move the three files from the root directory of the Class disk to the new folder. Display the contents of bitmaps in Explorer.
On the folder tree, rename the folder as BMP. All is fine in WinXP and Vista.
When the new name is accepted, the name is rewritten by Win98 as Bmp. By default Win98 won't let you use all caps in a file or folder name. To work around this "feature", you can rename the folder with a space between the letters, B M P. Where there is a will, there is a way!
Open a file in Paint:

From the Contents pane, open the file Forest.bmp by double-clicking the filename. The picture opens in Paint.
Right click on Soap Bubbles.bmp in your Class disk and select Edit . The picture opens in Paint.

Problem: Image opens in the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer or in the Windows Photo Gallery.
Cause: Your double-clicked which selects the default menu item, Preview, or you clicked on Preview in the popup menu.
Solution: Close the viewer window and try again.

Problem: Image opens in another graphics program
Cause: Most graphics programs change the file associations when they are installed to open all images in that program.
Solution: You can try to work with it there, or else close that program and open Paint yourself and then open the file from inside Paint with File > Open.
Use the Text tool to write your name and Win2-2 on the picture using white, Braggadocio or Britannic Bold or another font with large wide letters at 20 pt.
Hint: Click the bottom area of the toolbar to get a transparent background for your text.

Vista comes with many more fonts than WinXP and Win98, but not quite the same ones. Some of the new fonts are primarily for languages that do no use the Latin alphabet that English uses, like Arabic, Hindi, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, and Thai. Such fonts may all look the same for the English alphabet.
Use Save As to save the file under a new name -
spruce.bmp for Win98 or mysoap.bmp for WinXP and Vista in the BMP folder.
Check the Page Setup and Print Preview. Make adjustments if necessary to print the image at the upper left of the page.
If all is arranged happily, print.
Do NOT close Paint.

Refresh; Delete; Cascade; Backup

Switch back to Explorer with ALT + TAB. Notice that your file spruce.bmp (or mysoap.bmp) is at the bottom of the list. It is not in alphabetical order! Refresh the listing. (Press the F5 key or use View > Refresh from the menu.)
Delete the original of the file you edited, Forest.bmp or Soap Bubbles.bmp, from the folder BMP.
Cascade the windows.

Screen Capture

Capture an image of the whole desktop with Print Screen.
Open a new Paint window by starting Paint again. Paste your screen capture. When asked if you want to enlarge the bitmap, choose No (unless the space will be too small to show even the right pane). This will crop your image for you! This works great for this particular image.
Type your name and Win2-2 at the top of the image. Be sure it is readable and don't cover the titles of the windows.
Save the file as win2-2.bmp in the folder win project2.

Print

Check Page Setup and Print Preview. Be sure the image will fit on one page. Make changes if needed.
Problem: Image is too wide for the paper
Solution: Try changing the margins. If it is still too wide, either print 1 page, or go back to Paint and select enough of the image, to show the right pane contents and the title bars of the cascaded windows, copy and paste into a new document. Check settings for this version.
Print. Check your printout.
If all is OK with the printout, close both Paint windows and Find/Search.

Backup

For floppy disks only:

Backup your Class floppy disk to your Backup floppy disk using Copy Disk.
Close Explorer.

For other removable media:

Copy your files to a folder on your hard disk or to a different removable drive.
Close Explorer.

Files & Folders Exercises