File Explorer offers a search box at the upper-right, with the caveat that that box searches whichever folder of your PC you have currently open: If you have the Documents folder open, for example, Documents and any subfolders are searched by default. File Explorer search uses the folders that your PC has access too, making no distinction between cloud-native and local files; if your PC stores placeholder files locally, they’ll be searched just like any other file.
- Windows-Search-File-Explorer.png (477.33 KiB) Viewed 931 times
Finally, File Explorer offers what some of you may have been looking for all along: a detailed “search options” menu right in the center of the screen. Weirdly, however, that menu only seems to materialize after you’ve typed in a search term inside the search box. The search options are there to refine that search, with intuitive options that include “kind” (email, journal, task, picture, and many more), and whether the file exists in a subfolder, a compressed folder, an entirely different folder, and more.
File Explorer also has the advantage of an optional preview pane, by which you can get a look at a photo, PDF file, or document without needing to technically open it. The preview pane’s default size is small enough that you’ll likely have to open the document to use it, but you can at least get an idea of whether it’s the document you were looking for.