When I started my career in the “professional world” I took over the position of creative marketing and design at a title and escrow company here in town.

The computer I sat down to on my first day was the computer that had been used for 5 years to put together this companies marketing tools, fliers, brochures, graphics, website designs, and more.

Trying to find a file I needed, on a computer I’ve never used, and trying to parse through the massive amounts of folders and pictures and Word documents, etc, was no easy task. Especially when I needed to find it “RIGHT NOW!”

So, being a tech savvy nerd, I turned to Google. Google has an AWESOME application you can download for free to your personal computer that indexes all of the files on your computer, including the content inside the files. It’s called Google Desktop.

Google Desktop basically acts like a search engine for your computer. Imagine putting the power of Google Search onto your personal computer. Well, now you can with Google Desktop.

Say, for example, I was looking for a Word document that included the words: Real estate, transaction, mchenry, 2004. After installing Google Desktop, I hit the “CTRL” button on my keyboard twice. Google automatically pops a search box into the middle of my screen. From there I type in the keywords and Google immediately returns a list of any documents, files, etc. that matched my keywords. Whether the keywords are in the filename, or inside the actual file, it makes no difference. Google will still find the file I need and save me!

If you’re like me, this might be a useful tool for those of us who have massive amounts of files on our hard drives, but not enough time (or energy) to organize them everyday. To download it, visit the Google Desktop website.