Jan's Working with Windows 10:

Step-by-Step:  Search in Help

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What you will learn:

to use keywords to search Help to use 'Find on the page'

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Start with:  Browser opened to Microsoft Windows support from the previous lesson.

You are going to look for a list of keyboard shortcuts and for a list of touchscreen/touchpad
gestures for Windows.

A keyboard shortcut is a combination of keys that you can use instead of clicking with a mouse or tapping with a finger. It is faster to use a keyboard shortcut than it is to dig through menus or find the right icon to click on.
Examples: CTRL + C will copy whatever is selected. CTRL + V will paste whatever was copied.

A gesture is a motion you make with one or more fingers on a touchscreen or a touchpad that produces an action, like you would do with a mouse. Gestures are most useful on tablets and laptop with touchscreens. Not all touchpads can handle the gestures that use 3 or 4 fingers.
Examples: A tap on the screen or touchpad is the same as a left mouse click. A tap with two fingers is the same as a right click.

Search Help with Keywords

Each Help web page has a search text box at the top. Pick your keywords carefully!

1. Click in the Search icon box at the top of any of the Windows Help web pages.
   The Search text box expands and is now ready for your typing.

   
   

2. Type keyboard shortcuts.
   A list of suggestions appears as you type.

   

3. Press the ENTER key or click the magnifying glass at the right end of the box.

   The page changes to show a list of articles that match the keywords.

   

   Most useful first: Windows tries to guess which articles you would find the most useful and puts them first in category's list. The order appears to be similar to the following-

   Article contains the keywords: 

   • in the title

   • somewhere as a phrase

   • somewhere as separate words instead of as a phrase

   • only 1 word from the phrase

   Some articles may not contain the keywords at all but the are considered to be related to your keywords. It may not be obvious to you why Windows thinks so! Sometimes the page's author included your keywords in the hidden keyword META tag for the page. Sometimes the author made an error and the keywords don't apply!
   

4. Scroll the list to see all of the results on the page.
   How good are the results? Does it look like any will lead to keyboard shortcuts for Windows 10?

   Some of the results are clearly not about Windows 10, even though you were on a Windows 10 page when you searched. Sadly, the search box does NOT pay attention to what section of the Microsoft site you are in.

   Warning: Your results will be different from the illustration.
   I got different results or at least a different order each time I refreshed the page or started over! Microsoft is somehow including what users around the world are doing in their decision about what to show and in what order to show it.

5. At the bottom of the page, click on the 2 to get another page of results.
   The page changes to show the next page of links to articles.
6. View each of the remaining pages of results, using the navigation numbers at the bottom of each page.
   Did you see any results that did not look like they belonged at all?
   
7. Open and inspect a several of the articles in the results list.
   Are there any that do not seem to belong?
8. Return to the first page of results by clicking the 1 in the navigation buttons at the bottom of the page.
   Alternate method: Use the Back button for your browser.
   
9. Click on the Search icon again to open the Search box.
10. In the Search box on the page, edit the keywords to read
    keyboard shortcuts windows 10

    

11. Press the ENTER key.

12. Inspect the new results page.
    Is this better?

    These results do seem to be better. It's all in the keywords!
    [Your results will likely be different.]

13. View all of the results for this new set of keywords.
    You will still see some of those not-right results, but they should be further down in the list of results than before.

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Find On This Page: Key Combo

Sometimes your keywords may not be in the title or even the first paragraph of the article. To search on a particular page, you must switch to a different search feature, Find (on this page). All major browsers have this kind of command... somewhere.

In this section you will search on a specific page for specific keywords.

1. Click on the result: Keyboard Shortcuts in Windows - Windows Help

   The window displays a long article.

   Do you see your keywords on this page?

   This page looks like it might have what we want. It also looks like our previous keywords will show up many times!

   Browsers tend to hide the 'Find on this page' command in different places. But there is a keyboard shortcut that should work for all!
   

2. Hold the CTRL key down and press the F key (CTRL + F).
   The Find box shows up somewhere.

   Chrome top right
   Firefox bottom left
   IE11 top left
   Edge top left

3. Start typing in the keywords, keyboard shortcuts .
   Watch what the browser highlights words as you type.

   

   You will see one color for the current match and a different color for other matches on the page. For Firefox you must choose to highlight all matches to see more than one at a time.

   The number of matches found on the page shows beside the search box. When the illustrations were captured, there were 16 matches on the page.

   All or nothing: The Find dialog is not like Search! It looks for the phrase only, not for individual words in the phrase. So if you type in cats and dogs, Find will not find the single word "cats" or "dogs". You would have to repeat your search with single words.

   Match whole word only: Your browser may allow you to search only for your exact keywords. So if you typed in cat, the results would never include cats or category or catastrophe at any time.

   Match case: Your browser may let you choose to match case in its search. If you typed in cat, then the results would not include Cat.

4. Scroll the page to see where the matches are on the page.
5. Experiment: Using Find
   How many times is the word windows on the page? How about cut? How about cut followed by a space?
   Use Find on this page with your own keyword or keywords.
   Can you find key combos that would be useful to the way you work?