PLEASE NOTE: A preliminary U.S. patent search is ideally a classification search of granted U.S. patents and published U.S. patent applications conducted to determine patentability of an invention. It can be supplemented with a keyword search, though there are dangers with relying on a keyword search only. Please keep that in mind when doing keyword searching for patents.
Although the tutorial above mainly shows how to do keyword searching for granted U.S. Patents in PatFT, one can also do limited searches of current patent applications in AppFT. The AppFT search choices can be found by scrolling down the USPTO Patent Search page - and offers the same Quick Search methods as PatFT.