Search in Windows Vista has been an interesting beast for anyone who followed Vista during the Longhorn years. First it was going to be pervasive throughout the system to the point of making the user folders (Documents, Music, etc.) virtual folders (smart folders, for those who know the Mac version of them.) Slowly and without mention, the search features were brought back into a more manageable feature set. One facet of the old search that remained through to Vista final was called Stacks.

Bill is just your average, run of
the mill guy, worth a trifling
$50 billion

Few people know how stacks work, or even what to do with them. Stacks have received minimal press coverage, and no one really seems to know or care about them. They are neat, but not even Microsoft really explained them enough to get people interested. Luckily, they fit well into the whole desktop metaphor that most modern operating systems have at least a minimal base in, so figuring them out wasn’t too much of a challenge.

To understand stacks in the digital sense, one must think back to a physical desk. Let’s say that Bill works in an office in the time before computers. Let’s say that Bill wants to temporarily organize all of his memos in a folder marked “Floor 4 Correspondence” by the date sent. What’s the most logical thing to do? Arrange them into stacks. Stacks are just a quick way to organize files based on a trait, such as filetype or date modified.

Searching for all files related
to Deep Thought

Here’s the hard part. A stack is nothing more than an arbitrary entity. In the physical scenario, one doesn’t move the stack to a folder; one moves some of the items in the stack to a folder. If it happens that there are no more items that make up the stack, then the stack is just gone. Its the same case as with the digital versions: you can’t move the stack itself, but you can move the files in it.

Let’s look at a digital scenario. Bill wants to take all of his emails related to Deep Thought, stack them according to how recently they were received, and move all of the ones received before the present month to an archive folder.

To start, he opens the Search dialog from the Start Menu. He searches for his keyword, in this case, “Deep Thought.” He wants to see only emails, so he filters out all filetypes except “Windows Mail E-Mail Messages”. Next, he stacks them by date to get an idea of how many emails he’s going to need to move. Lastly, he opens the Earlier This Year stack, selects them all, and moves them where he wants them.

Viewing all Date Modified stacks

That process, however, doesn’t have much of an advantage over filtering by date and type and just going from there, but there is one function of stacks that can’t be utilized by simple filtering. Shortcuts can point to stacks. A better use for stacks could involve a network where files are placed in a certain folder. If one needed quick access to the items in this folder, but only from the current date, a shortcut could be placed on the desktop to that folder with only files from that day showing.

Ill be the first to admit that stacks aren’t very groundbreaking, and are rather removed from what they were intended to be in the beginning, but they can be useful for seeing options for filtering laid out for quick perusal.

Also, please don’t try and start something about the value of stacks in the comments section, because that isn’t what this article is about. This article is intended to help those who don’t understand stacks to learn what they are. If you want to debate stacks, our tragically underused forum is that-a-way.