DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - JAN 2016
USING THE PROGRAM EVERYTHING IN FAMILY HISTORY
©2017 Donald R. Snow
This page was last updated 2017-03-03
These Freeware Corner notes are published in TAGGology, our Utah
Valley Technology and Genealogy Group (UVTAGG) monthly newsletter, and
are posted on
http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html where there may
be corrections or updates.
THE FREEWARE PROGRAM EVERYTHING
EVERYTHING is a Windows computer utility program available free
from https://www.voidtools.com/
. If in doubt as to which Windows version you need, try the top
one since that works for most of us. This program finds all
files anywhere on your computer with any characters or words in the titles that you
search for and allows you to launch, rename, copy, move, work with, or
delete them. Because it searches your entire hard drive it finds
files that you have forgotten or thought were lost on your computer,
or files of which you only remember a few characters in the name, no
matter what folders they are in. It is a program that I use many
times every day. Two things to mention at the start:
first, it is a Windows program, but there is probably something
similar for Mac; and second, it will only search NTSF-formatted drives
and flash drives, not FAT nor FAT32 drives. These are computer
jargon terms for the way the flash drives are formatted and most of us
don't need to know what they mean. We seldom have to search
flash drives, but if you do, just copy them to a temporary folder on
the desktop and all the files will be included in the EVERYTHING
search results.
HELPS AND OPTIONS
When you run EVERYTHING, across the top you see the words File, Edit,
View, Search, Bookmarks, Tools, and Help. Some of these are
standard for Windows programs. Pressing Help (or F1) takes you
to their website http://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/
which has 20-25 well-explained help topics. They include things
like Installing, Using, Customizing, Updating, Keyboard Shortcuts,
Options, Searching, Other Languages, and What's New. The
Installing section shows how to install it on various computer
operating system types and even how to use it portably, so it can be
run from a flash drive and doesn't need to be installed on the
computer that it is searching. The Using Everything section
gives you a quick run-through of how to use it. The Searching
section gives all the search syntax including the Boolean operators
and wildcards, modifiers, function syntax and attributes so you can
search for files created or updated on, before, or after dates you
specify or sizes of files, and other options. There really is a
complete set of search parameters. I also turn on the "Show
Search Terms Bold" so each search character or term is bolded in the
results lists. In the Helps down at the bottom of the Searching
section are examples of how to do different kinds of searches.
The Options Help section shows how to set EVERYTHING for searching and
showing the results the way you want. The ETP section shows how
to set up your computer so you can search it from another computer,
which sounds helpful, but I don't know how to do that yet. In
the Help section under Customizing, it says there is a way to change
the date format so the results are in any date format you want, e.g.
International Date Format with YYYY-MM-DD, but I haven't been able to
get it to do that. In the Options, under the Tools tab, you can
set which drives you want it to search and display, how to change the
colors, etc. If you have folders or drives that you use for
backups and you don't want those searched, so you don't inadvertently
delete or move those backup files, tell EVERYTHING not search
those. I usually set it to run when my computer boots up, so
it's available whenever I want to use it. It will rescan your
hard drive periodically and when you tell it to by pressing the F5
(Refresh) key. It will also tell me if there is a new version of
EVERYTHING, so I can download it. The program has many options, but most of us just
need the basic parts and there is an option to Restore Defaults
when you want.
FINDING FILES
The basic search syntax is space = AND, ! = NOT, | = OR, " " =
exact phrase, < > = grouping, and * = wildcard for one or
more characters. There are several search examples on the Help
> Searching menu that you can look at. Note that all folders
with the search criteria show up first in the results list and then
the files. To search for just files include file: in the search
box. For just folders include folder:. As an example, to
search for all jpg photos on your computer, enter .jpg .
Or to find photos of several kinds, search for .jpg | .tif |
.png , etc. If you search for .jpg .tif .png , you
probably won't get anything, since there probably are no files that
contain all of these. In searching for other things I have been
finding files on my computer that I had forgotten about with names
like "our report to the HC", so when I come across such, I rename them
to something like
SnowDonaldRay(1931-)-2000-01-05-LDS-Mission-ReportToMorningsideStakeHighCouncil.txt
so they will show up where they belong later. My naming process
is explained in detail elsewhere, but is a system I have worked out
over several years so that by using EVERYTHING, all files related to a
person alphabetize in chronological order for the person. Some
of you remember when file names could only be 8 characters long, plus
3 for the extension, so we worked out codes to name things in those
days. Now I'm finding lots of those old files that I had
forgotten about. They turn up when I try old short names or
partial names or nicknames. I also find that there are
misspellings in file names, so I try things like Staf*rd to find
Stafford, Staford, Staferd, etc. The numbers you see in the
lower left-hand corner of a results screen is the number of results
with that search criteria. You will be interested to note the
total number of all files and folders on your computer by using
nothing in the search box. That number may be in the
millions. For example, on my desktop computer right now,
EVERYTHNG says I have more than 2,800,000 files and folders!
PREVIEW PANE
As in FILE EXPLORER, EVERYTHING now has a Preview Pane so you
can see what's in the file without having to open it in its
default program and this is extremely helpful. To turn on
the Preview Pane go to View and click on Preview. You now
see a large area to the right where the file content will be
shown in place of the file data such as the date created, file
size, etc. Now, as you highlight a file, you see its
contents in the Preview Pane to the right and you can work with
it without having to open it in a program. For example,
seeing what's inside the file, you can rename it. Of, if
you find files with the same name and content, but in different
folders, you can immediately delete one or more of them.
To see examples of this do searches for things like .jpg or .doc
or .txt and as you highlight a file title, you'll see the
contents. You can even use this as a slideshow of a
collection of photos by arrowing down to highlight the names of
files in the collection and watching the Preview Pane. The
Preview Pane can be widened by moving the vertical bar by
clicking on it and moving right or left. This feature will
save many clicks when doing file maintenance.
RUNNING AND RENAMING FILES
Once you have found a file with EVERYTHING, just click on it to open
it in the default rogram you have set for that extension on your
computer. No matter where the file is on your computer, once you
find it, clicking on it will run it or open it in its appropriate
program. To rename a file just highlight it in EVERYTHING, click
Rename, and rename it right there. If there are several files
you want to rename, you can do them one at a time in EVERYTHING, but
if there are many, it might be easier to highlight them all,
drag-and-drop them to a new temporary folder on your desktop, and use
something like BULK RENAME UTILITY to rename them all at once. I
haven't found a way to rename whole blocks of files in EVERYTHING all
at once, but there may be a way.
ADVANCED SEARCH
EVERYTHING now has an Advanced Search page that has boxes to
fill in for various kinds of searches, so you can do more than
with just the original search box. It allows you to enter
all the terms you want in the ways you want them searched.
USING EVERYTHING TO ORGANIZE FILES
I use EVERYTHING to work on groups of files by finding the group with
the search criteria, highlighting them all by clicking the first file
in the list, holding down the Shift key and clicking on the bottom one
(This is a Windows property.), then draging-and-droping the collection
to the folder I want in FILE EXPLORER or Q-DIR or other file
management program. For people with the same surname I usually
move the files to a surname folder with that name. As these
files come into the new folder I can eliminate duplicates since, if
there is already a file with that name in the folder, it will stop and
ask if I want to replace or rename the new file coming in. If I
choose rename, it adds a number at the end, e.g. _2 or _3. I
have found this very helpful since many times I have copied an entire
set of files somewhere to use them and then forgotten to delete the
copied files and they are all just duplicates. As I move them to
the same folder, when it stops on a file with duplicate name, I can
check the properties to see if it is the same file or maybe an updated
version of it, and decide which or both to save.
CONCLUSIONS
These are just a few of the ways I have learned to use EVERYTHING and
I'm sure there are many more. But with just this you can see the
uses of it, and not just for family history. I have been
surprised at how many files I have found with EVERYTHING on my
computer that I had forgotten about, but that I have now renamed, so I
can find them easily, and they all sort in chronological order where
they belong. I find that I use EVERYTHING everyday to run, copy,
move, delete, or rename files. Many times I have created the
same file at different times so they have slightly different names and
I can delete one. I hope you find the program as helpful as I do
and it's completely free.
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