Get to the Find Tool by right clicking MY COMPUTER (on the desktop) and select Find from the drop down menu. Note: Some versions of Windows will say Search instead of Find

There are three parts of this tool, Name & Location, Date Modified, and Advanced. It is important to understand that these parts work together. If you enter a date on the date section, and a file name on the name section, the tool will only return files with that name and that date.

The asterisk is called a wild card and may be used to replace the file name or the extension. *.doc will search for all files with the .doc extension. farm.* will find all files named farm with any extension.

Using the wild card for the file name to search by file type can be very useful.

For example; search for *.wps, will find all text files created by the program Microsoft Works.

*.xls will find all Excel files

*.doc will find all WordPad and all Microsoft Word files

Search by date

If you don’t know the name of the file, but know that you worked on it yesterday, try searching by date.

If you know some distinctive words that were in the file that you are looking for (and are probably not used in many other files!) use the advance tab to search for text. If you tell it to look for the text Didion, it will show you the letter written to your friend Sam Didion, as well as the database you were creating that contained Didion contract.

If you see the file name pop up that you were looking for, you can click on the stop button to stop the computer from continuing to search, and double click on the file name and you will be working on that document!