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There's a great new free software program that will help you save tons of time when searching through files on your computer. It lets you see what's inside your files without your having to actually spend time opening them.

Even if you give your files meaningful names, sometimes it's still hard to find the exact one you want when you're looking for it weeks or months later. Often, you can use the Windows automatic search function and its advanced features to find the file you need.

If that doesn't work, you're pretty much stuck with opening up your files with the program that created them, and looking at them one at a time. And that can take a lot of time if you have a lot of files.

So, imagine my delight when I learned of a free program that would let me peek inside my files without actually opening them. This sounded like a great new way to save time, especially considering the fact that I'd been unsuccessfully searching for a file that my son had created for me a couple of months ago.

More details about that later. First let me tell the name of the program, how to install it, and how to use it.

It's called Universal Viewer (just do a quick Google search to find it) and the basic download will let you peek into your text, image, multimedia, and HTML files. Click on the Installer link listed under the free version heading and choose save to download the file to your computer.

The files are zipped, so you'll need to unzip them. If you don't already have a program on your computer to do this, there are several free ones available. Two popular ones are 7zip and Tugzip.

After you have the files unzipped, you'll have an icon on your desktop that's the Universal Viewer Free Setup. Double click on it to install the program.

If you also want to be able to peek inside Microsoft Word and Excel files, get the Office plug-in from the same site.

If you want to look inside your Open Office files, there's also a viewer that lets you do that.

The easiest way to get started using Universal Viewer is to highlight a file you want to look at, right click to bring up your options menu, then click on the words Universal Viewer.

Presto. You'll be looking at the contents inside your file.

Universal Viewer works quickly with sets of files that you have in folders. To quickly go through all the files in a folder, use the forward and backward navigation arrows.

Back to my original problem. I'd tried finding my file by looking for it myself, manually. I'd tried the Windows search function with advanced options, including a word I thought was in the file name and the approximate date range I thought it was created. No luck.

After I installed Universal Viewer, I searched again for all graphics files that had been modified during the past three months. There were 2486 files found. I can only imagine how long it would have taken me to open up my graphics programs and then open up the files one at a time.

Instead, I used Universal Viewer to peek into the most likely folders, and in less than 30 seconds, I found what I was looking for. Quite impressive.

I figure I saved at least an hour. And I figure I'll have a lot more use for it in the future. You probably will, too.