Windows 10 How-To: Using Cortana to easily search for files and pictures on your PC

As many of you know, Cortana landed on PCs last month with the release of Windows 10, having been present on mobile since the release of Windows Phone 8.1 back in July 2014. On PCs, Cortana has a slightly different feature set, and one of the things she can do on PCs that she currently cannot do on phones is search for files.

This handy capability makes it dead simple to find documents and files that you’ve worked on recently with your voice, or by typing. Here are some of things you can ask Cortana to do:

“Find document titled ‘Back to School’

“Find PowerPoint presentations from last year”

“Find documents I worked on today”

“What was the last document I opened?”

“Find documents written on the 20^th”

“Show me my Excel sheets”

“Find photos from yesterday”

“Find photos from the park”

“Find pictures from the UK”

The best thing about searching for documents is that Cortana will search for them not only on your PC, but also from OneDrive, and thus, your other devices too if you have them synced. Cortana also searches within files so it makes it easy to search for documents (and pictures) if you only remember the content, but not the title or when it was created.

Cortana on Windows 10 is a massive asset when utilized to its full potential. Let us know in the comments section below how often you find yourself searching for files using Cortana, and if you think this is a useful feature.