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Thursday, September 28, 2006

Searchable Windows Settings

Earlier today, Michael Kaplan shared his experience trying to find a setting in Windows Vista. The point was that it's difficult to find a setting it is no longer in the same place as in XP.

We've reached a point where organization is no longer enough

I'm wondering: Why do we have to go up and down through a whole tree of applets, dialogs, tabs and pages? I agree that it's good to have settings listed and arranged that way (since it allows to find stuff you wouldn't have thought of, as Michael pointed).

But let's admit it: With the amount of settings continuously growing, it becomes impossible to find anything that is not among the most basic and obvious ones.

Index and Find, anyone?

Why don't we have what Help has has for more than 10 years: Index and Find ? Isn't it obvious that the best solution to help people find what they are searching is... a Search button!
I don't mean searching the Help to find where things are hidden. I mean a real 'Search setting' feature that would list settings matching your full-text criterias and allow you to modify them.

Michael's search for the menu behaviour regarding underlined shortcuts (Alt or no Alt) would be easy:

[menu alt underlined] [Search]

would lead to:

[x] Underline keyboard shortcuts and access keys (explain)
[Apply]

Boy, this would be cool!

Update: BTW, in addition to the explain link, a locate link would be cool too.

Update2: Er... Looks like the Microsofties didn't wait for me and my wonderful ideas ;-) Go to Control Panel. There's a search field (it gets the focus automatically). Type Underline and there you go! Thanks to martni (in MichKap comments).

3 Comments:

At 6:31 PM, Anonymous said...

Um, Vista already has that feature. Type a word or phrase into the box in the upper right corner of the Control Panel.

 
At 6:38 PM, Serge Wautier said...

Hi Anonymous,
Thanks for the info.
(it seems that you posted your comment while I was updating my post accordingly)

 
At 7:57 AM, mssearch dev said...

yeah that's how you do a search in Vista.

some people amazed me, asking how to find indexing options in control panel.

 

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