Windows 10: The Missing Manual

Chapter 3. Organizing & Finding Your Files

Every disk, folder, file, application, printer, and networked computer is represented on your screen by an icon. To avoid spraying your screen with thousands of overlapping icons seething like snakes in a pit, Windows organizes icons into folders, puts those folders into other folders, and so on. This folder-in-a-folder-in-a-folder scheme works beautifully at reducing screen clutter, but it means that you’ve got some hunting to do whenever you want to open a particular icon.

Helping you find, navigate, and manage your files, folders, and disks with less stress and greater speed is one of the primary design goals of Windows—and of this chapter. The following pages cover Windows 10’s improved Search function, plus icon-management life skills like selecting them, renaming them, moving them, copying them, making shortcuts of them, assigning them to keystrokes, deleting them, and burning them to CD or DVD.

The Search Box

Every computer offers a way to find and open files and programs. And in Windows 10, the Search feature has been improved—well, changed, anyway. It now searches both your computer and the web simultaneously (you can turn that off). And Microsoft has tried to mix together Search and Cortana, Windows 10’s voice-controlled assistant.

But at its heart, Search is still Search. It’s how you open an app, find a file, or adjust a setting just by typing a few letters. It can save you a lot of hunting and burrowing through your folders.

It’s ...