Searching for files

In the previous lesson, we just went ahead and opened up this diagram that you can see here on my screen. Don't worry, if you skipped to this lesson, you haven't opened this diagram, no problem, we are just going to look now at another way to open the document or diagram as it's sometimes called in Visio and that's by searching for files and there is a few different ways that you can search through your files to find the one you are looking for to open and it all happens from the Open dialog box. So we will go up to the Open button up here on the standard toolbar or file and open it's up to you, give it a click and navigate to the Lesson1 folder of your exercise Files for Visio.

Now, we have only got four diagrams in here, but by the way we are looking at them right now which is the default view called List. We are not getting a lot of information about each of these besides their name. You can see that they are Visio diagrams from their icon. But all we see now is their title or the name of the actual diagram. Well, there is some different views that will help us find what we are looking for. So if we go up here inside the Option dialog box and click the Views dropdown, you can see we have got options like Small Icons, List, Details, Tiles.

Let's go down to Details and we will start there. As soon as we do, we have now got all of our diagram names showing up like we did before, but now we can also see the dates that they were modified. Over to the right now, you can see the type and we have got more off here to the right, but our dialog box isn't big enough. So let's stretch it out, we will just go to the border here on the right side, when you see the double arrow, we will click and drag it out and you can see there are some more columns here and we can actually separate these columns and stretch them out to by going to the borders, so that we know that we are seeing all of the information in each column.

So right now, there is a little arrow showing up at the top of Name here, because we are looking at an alphabetical listing of our diagrams by Name. If we wanted them sorted by Date, we can click on Date Modified and now you can see the most recent down to the oldest document down here. We can change the order by clicking the button again, so now I see a list of my diagrams, but in the reverse order. I can also sort them by Type. They are all Microsoft Office Visio drawings but I can also see their sizes here and again, I can sort them by their sizes either going up or going down in size.

Let's go back to Name, we will click on Name and you will notice that each of these also has a dropdown. If we click the dropdown, you can see that we can sort them, we can group them, we can choose just to see groups of our diagrams by, you can see alphabetically by A-H, I-P. We can stack them by name, all kinds of different options here as well. But again, this would work better if you had tons and tons of files or documents or diagrams in this folder. Now, what if we needed to find one of these that we know has our process in it or something that wasn't given away by the title.

We can actually get a little bit of a thumbnail view of the diagram by changing the view to something other than details. So let's go back in here and let's go to Small Icons to start. Well, that doesn't really help us. All we are seeing now our little icons next to the name. So we will go up here and we will change it now to Medium icons, ah, look at that. So the icons are changing to show us a little bit of what's inside each of these diagrams. Still very hard to see, but our basic diagram that we have open already you can see that's the diagram itself showing up on the icon.

So let's change it now to large icons. Now we can also use this scrollbar to change the size, you can see in the dialog box, the size changing in front of your eyes. So that's large and this is somewhere between large and extra large right here. That gives me a good idea of what I am looking at and if this was the process I was looking for then I have actually got a preview of it before I click on it and click open to open it up. Now one other way to search for some of your files and again this would really work better if you had many, many files and many, many diagrams to search through is to use the Search field up here.

So for example, if I want to see all of my diagrams that start with P, I could start typing in the letter P and see now it is switched back to the Details view here and I am going to keep typing, I am going to type in R and look at that, there is only one that starts with Pr, it's my process1. So if I was to click on that, I don't even have to click on it, but change the view to Large Icons. You can see, I am only seeing that one and sure enough that's the one I want, again may be just to be sure I can go to Extra Large Icon, oh yeah that's the one I want.

I would click on it and make sure it's selected and click Open to open it up. So many ways to find what it is you are looking for, of course you can navigate through the folders, but once you get to a folder that has many, many diagrams in it either use your Search field up here, I am going to take those out now to see all of my diagrams and then remember that you have got many views here that will help you sort things out, get organized inside the Open dialog box and even get a little preview of what's inside each of the diagrams. I am going to click Cancel.

I am going to close anything that I have open on my screen right now by clicking this Close button up here in the top right corner.