Tips, tricks, tools, and techniques for Microsoft Office

Wouldn't it be nice if you could have a fast and easy search tool for your hard drive that returned results à la Google? That's just what FILEhand does. After indexing your hard drive, the utility returns results with blinding speed and equal accuracy.

Installation is quick and painless. After copying files to your system, you may specify which file types are indexed. Your choices: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Text, HTML, MP3, Acrobat, WordPerfect. You can specify the file extensions that define "text" (such as .TXT, .C, .log, etc.), as well as if in HTML files are to be indexed along with the rest of the file's text. From FILEhand's list you select the folders (and subfolders) you want indexed, as well as how many minutes to wait between looking for (and indexing) new and changed files. You can specify the hours during which indexing can occur (for example, to restrict indexing to overnight). I found that a 60-minute interval was about right, and the program's indexing in the background didn't hog system resources so as to hinder my current work.

The program will tell you the status of indexing (how many files out of how many eligible files have been indexed) at any time, and a panel in the main window tells you how many minutes until the next indexing begins. You can choose an option to force indexing to begin immediately.

Searching is quite flexible. For example, you can search for multiple terms (the file must contain ant and bee, ant or bee, ant but not bee, and so on), as well as exact phrases (by putting the phrase in quotation marks).

FILEhand's main screen

You can limit file selection in several ways. The program can look for files based on their full name, or you can use wildcards (* and ?), or Perl-style regular expressions. You can also specify files based on the file's last-modified date by entering the date(s) you want, such as: today, this week, 5/1/04, 4/1 - 4/15, after 4/1, 2 weeks ago, or last 3 months. The program displays a small search field for your criteria when you click on the System Tray icon, or you can maximize the program (see illustration) and use a simple search interface and the "advanced" interface (which includes separate fields for all words you want to include, exact phrases, at least one of the words entered will be found -- a fancy "or" search), words to exclude, file dates, and filenames to find.

Click the Search button and the results are returned instantly. You'll see the file description (typically the first line from the file or the <title> information from an HTML page), the relevance (100% means it is the best match for your criteria), a section of text with your matched word(s) in bold, and the file name, date, and size. Files are ranked by relevance, just as they are in Google. Click on the title or file name links and FILEhand will open the source file.

There are some limitations. Depending on the number and type(s) of files selected for indexing, you'll probably want to start indexing overnight after installing the program; the process is very slow. DtSearch, which we reviewed last summer (http://www.officeletter.com//blink/dtsearch.html) offers a faster search and more advanced searching options, but its interface is more cluttered and it's $160 more. You can speed up FILEhand's searching by decreasing how many characters are displayed in the document summary, from the default (200 characters) to 50 or to zero.

In addition, FILEhand isn't very forgiving of misspellings the way Google is; it couldn't find "status bar" when I asked for "status barr", for example, and didn't offer any alternative search-term suggestions.

But don't just take my word for it -- the company offers a 30-day free trial. Visit their Web site at http://www.filehand.com/ and take it for a spin on your hard drive.

Editor's note:Version 1.3 of FILEhand was released shortly after this review was published. The vendor says the upgrade increases indexing speed by about 50 percent (the index status bar gives more information about the indexing operating, too), and users can now specify the location of the index file.

-- James E. Powell

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