Microsoft Windows 7 Unleashed

The whole purpose of the Start menu is, as its name implies, to start things, particularly programs and documents. Yes, you can also launch these objects via shortcut icons on the desktop, but that’s not a great alternative because windows cover the desktop most of the time. Yes, Windows 7’s enhanced taskbar enables you to launch stuff with the click of an icon, but there’s only so much room on the taskbar, so that handy technique should be saved for your most often used program.  So, if you want to get something going in Windows 7, the vast majority of the time you’re going to have to do it via the Start menu. The good news is that Windows 7’s Start menu is wonderfully flexible and geared, in fact, to launching objects with as few mouse clicks or keystrokes as possible. To get to that state, however, you have to work with a few rela tively obscure options and settings, which you’ll learn about in the next few sections.

Microsoft spent countless hours and untold millions of dollars testing and retesting the Windows 7 user interface (UI) in its usability labs. It’s important, however, to remember that Windows 7 is an operating system designed for the masses. With an installed base running in the hundreds of millions, it’s only natural that the Windows UI would incorporate lots of lowest common denominator thinking. So in the end, you have an interface that most people find easy to use most of the time; an interface that skews toward accommodating neophytes and the newly digital; an interface designed for a typical computer user, whoever the heck that is. In other words, unless you consider yourself a typical user (and your purchase of this book proves otherwise), Windows 7 in its right-out-of-the-box getup won’t be right for you. Fortunately, you’ll find no shortage of options and programs that will help you remake Windows 7 in your own image, and that’s just what the chapters here in Part I are all about. After all, you weren’t produced by a cookie cutter, so why should your operating system look like it was? Having said that, I should also point out that it’s my philosophy that the litmus test of any interface customization is a simple question: Does it improve productivity? I’ve seen far too many tweaks that fiddle uselessly with some obscure setting, resulting in little or no improvement to the user’s day-to-day Windows experience. This may be fine for people with lots of time to kill, but most of us don’t have that
luxury, so efficiency and productivity must be the goals of the customization process. (Note that this does not preclude aesthetic improvements to the Windows 7 interface. A better-looking Windows provides a happier computing experience, and a happier worker is a more productive worker.) To that end, I devote this chapter to one of the most common of computing tasks:  launching programs and documents. I packed this chapter with useful tips and techniques for rearranging the Windows 7 Start menu and taskbar to help you get your programs and documents up and running as quickly and as easily as possible.

In the preceding section, I showed you how to use advanced query syntax to create
powerful search queries. The only problem is that it’s a chore having to memorize all
those operators and what they’re used for. If you’re not up for all that, Windows 7 offers
an alternative. It’s called natural language search, and it enables you to perform complex
searches without using any operators. Sweet!
First, follow these steps to turn on natural language search:

1. If you have a folder window open, select Organize, Folder and Search Options (or
Tools, Folder Options if you have the menu displayed; otherwise, click Start, type
folder, and then press Enter to select Folder Options in the search results). The
Folder Options dialog box appears.

2. Select the Search tab.

3. Activate the Use Natural Language Search check box.

4. Click OK to put the new setting into effect.

Crafting natural language queries is a bit of a black art because Microsoft has no documen-
tation available. Feel free to experiment to get the feel of these queries.
A basic natural language query looks like this:
adjective kind verb value

Here, adjective is an optional value that narrows down the search, usually by using a
value from a property (such as a genre for music or a file type for images); kind is the type
of file, such as music or images; verb is a verb that more or less corresponds to the property
you want to match, such as modified (the Date Modified property), (the Date Created prop-
erty), from (the From property in an email), and by (the Artist property in a music file);
and value is the specific value you want to match.
For example, if you want to return all the pop music done by the band Sloan, you’d enter
the following query:
pop music by sloan
Similarly, if you want all the JPEG images that were created today, you’d use the following
query:
jpeg images created today
You can keep adding more properties and values to target your searches. For example, if
we want our Sloan search to return only those songs rated with five stars, we’d modify the
search as follows:
pop music by sloan rating *****
You can still perform Boolean searches in natural language queries. For example, if you
want documents where the Author property includes Paul or Karen, you’d use the
following query:
documents by paul or karen
Similarly, if you want to return all your videos except those in the QuickTime format,
you’d use the following:
videos not quicktime
NOTE
Unlike with AQS, the Boolean operators or and not can appear in lowercase letters.
(The Boolean operator and is implied in all multiterm natural language queries, so you
never have to use it.)
Finally, note that when you’re working with dates, there are several keywords you can use
in your natural language queries, including the following: yesterday, today, tomorrow,
week, month, year, last, this, and next. For example, if you want to see all the TIFF
images created this week, you’d use the following:
jpeg images created this week.