Files & Folders:
Views-
Windows Vista/Win7
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Files & Folders:
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Unlike previous versions of Windows, in Windows Vista and Win7 there is only one type of window for looking at the contents of your computer, usually called simply Computer. Many people, and even some references in Windows Help, still call these Explorer windows. Most features are the same for both Vista and Win7. There are several different views you can use in this window and you can sort and group what you see in several ways. This lets you arrange what you see to suit what you need to do at the moment.
Details view (Windows Vista) |
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Project 2: Files & Folders |
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The main Computer window
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A folder of files
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A folder of images
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Organize
button: This button is always shown on the toolbar. It opens a menu
with which you can manage many aspects of a Computer window and its
contents.
The Layout submenu lets you choose to show or hide the various panes
and the menu bar.
Folder and Search Options opens a dialog with three tabs: General, View, and Search. This dialog is where you make changes to the default look and behaviors for your Computer windows and Windows Search.
Click
a tab in the illustration to show a different tab. Vista and Win7 are only
slightly different.
Contents
PaneThe Contents pane on the right of a Computer window shows what is in the folder or drive that is selected on the left. If the Folder list is collapsed on the left, you must look at the Address bar to see what is selected.
Drive Icons: Each type of drive as its own icon. A removable disk may be mis-identified as a local hard disk or even as a CD drive.
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Hard disks |
 DVD drive |
USB drive |
 Floppy disk |
Special Areas: Areas like the Recycle Bin and the Control Panel have their own icons.
Icons for special areas: Windows Vista, Windows 7
User Folders: Each login account has its own set of user folders, like
Documents, Pictures, Downloads, and Saved Games. Other users cannot change or
even see the files in these folders unless they have Administrator privileges. Some of these areas are listed in Favorite
Links in the Navigation pane by default.
In Vista, the user folders are blue-green while normal folders are yellow.
In
Win7, the user folders are very similar in design to Vista's
folders, but are yellow, like
normal folders.
Selected:
A selected file or folder is highlighted with color and a border. Sometimes
there is not a lot of contrast.
The illustration shows a selected folder Sample Pictures in the Navigation pane with a selected file Winter Leaves in the Contents pane.
A display might be scrolled enough to put the selected item out of sight. The Address bar
will still show what folder is selected.
Windows Vista and Win7 use many different folder icons,
depending on the contents of the folder. The largest three sizes of icons show a
thumbnail or icon for two random
documents in the folder. For images, the icon will show a thumbnail of the images. The examples below are Extra
Large Icons. Windows does not currently provide a way to select which document
type is illustrated or which images are used for the thumbnails.
 Contains subfolder(s) |
Contains images |
 Contains documents |
The icon for a file depends on the file type or on the
program that can open the file. A file that actually starts a program may have
its own icon, based on the program's logo, such as MS Word
or an Adobe PDF
. The illustrations below of
the different views show a number of these different file icons.
Icons for images:
The larger size icons are a thumbnail version
of the image itself .
The smaller icons for an image show an icon for the image's type, such as
JPG
,
GIF
, or
PNG
, or for
the program that will open the image, such as Paint
.
In
Win7 uses a generic image icon,
,
for all image files.
You
have many choices for how to display the files and folders in the right
pane of a Computer window in Windows Vista.
Views menu: Open the menu and click on a view.
Views button: 
Click the button itself to
rotate the display through the following: Large Icons, List, Details,
Tiles, and in
Win7
Content.
Views palette: Click the arrow at the right
of the Views button to open the palette.
Drag the slide to a choice or even in between choices for a slightly
different size: Extra Large Icons, Large Icons, Medium Icons, Small
Icons, List, Details,
Tiles, and in
Win7
Content.
Context menu: Right click in the Contents pane and select View and then a view on the menu.
The icon on the Views button changes to match the current view.
In all views, folders are normally listed first, then files.
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Medium icons or thumbnails of images. Alphabetical down a single column. With each icon is information similar to the Details view, but the icons are larger in this view. |
Special ViewsWindows Vista and Win7 come with some special views for particular types of files. Windows tries to guess what kind of files are in the folder and then use the default view for that type, in particular for music, images, and videos. If you have a mix of file types in a folder, Windows can easily guess wrong!
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Navigation PaneThe Navigation pane on the left contains a list of Favorite Links to folders that you use often and the Folders list (folder tree), which shows visually how the drives and folders are related to each other. The default is to have the Folders list hidden at the bottom so that all of your Favorite Links are visible. The icons in the left pane are the same, no matter which size icon is showing in the right pane.
The right pane shows the contents of the drive or folder that is selected on the left.
Navigation Pane at left of Computer window
Favorite Links
The
default list of Favorite Links at the top of the Navigation Pane includes links to the areas that users most commonly
save their own work: Documents,
Pictures, and Music. In previous versions
of Windows, these folders were called My Documents, My Pictures, My Music,
and so forth.
Add to Favorite Links: You can add other folders that you
use often by dragging the folder to this section of the pane. You won't be
moving anything, just creating a shortcut to the folder. Add web sites by
dragging the icon at the left of the address bar in your browser and
dropping it on Favorites.
The link Recently Changed does a search for files that have been created or modified recently. This can be quite handy when you save your work too fast to notice to which folder you saved it!
The link Searches stores previous searches.
This is particularly helpful if you find yourself doing the same search
frequently.
Favorites
& LibrariesIn Win7, there are by default only 3 links in the Favorites section at the top of the Navigation pane: Desktop, Downloads, Recent Places.
Recent Places lists the folders on your hard disks and removable disks that you have recently opened, not web sites. Hover over a folder to see a popup of the path. It's the only way to see what drive the folder is on.
Add to Favorites: You can add other folders that you use
often by dragging the folder to this section of the pane. You won't be
moving anything, just creating a shortcut to the folder. Add web sites by
dragging the icon at the left of the address bar in your browser and
dropping it on Favorites.
Libraries: The new
feature Libraries has links to
the libraries
Documents, Music,
Pictures, Videos by default. Libraries
are a way to group shortcuts to similar files that are in
different places. So you can put picture files in several different
folders on your hard disk and have Libraries show shortcuts to all of them
in the Pictures Library. The illustration shows the Pictures library which
contains links to folders in two different locations on the hard disk.
In Vista, you can
hide or show the Folders list by clicking the Folders button in the Navigation
pane.
For
Win7, you hide and show sections by collapsing or expanding the lists, as
described below.
Collapse
or Expand: When your mouse pointer is over the Folders list or
if an object in the
list is selected, you can see teeny, tiny arrows beside the folders
and drives that contain subfolders. Unlike previous versions of
Windows, the icon in the folder tree for an expanded folder
is the same as for a
collapsed folder.
The white arrow indicates a collapsed drive or folder. If you click the arrow, the list expands to show the subfolders.
The black angled arrow indicates an expanded drive or folder. It's subfolders are showing in the list. If you click the arrow, that part of the list collapses.
You can collapse and expand without changing what is displayed in the pane at the right. That pane shows what is in the folder that is selected in the left pane.
The Details pane at the bottom show details about the selected item. The type of information is quite different for different kinds of objects. Win7 shows less information than Vista. Examples below are from Vista...
 Multiple items selected |
 Computer |
 Drive C |
 A folder |
 An image file |
 A shortcut |
Let's start with some definitions:
To sort means to display items in a particular order, such as alphabetically or numerically.
To filter means to show only the items that meet certain rules (called criteria), such as files modified on a particular day or files of a particular type or files whose names contain certain letters.
To group means to display items in groups based on a particular property, such as names that start with the same letter or by file sizes or by the date modified.
In
Vista but not in Win7:
To stack
means to search for items based on a property and put them into
collections. An icon shows for each stack. When you open a stack, only the
items in that stack are visible.
Normally the items in the
Contents pane are sorted
alphabetically by name, with folders being listed first.
At the top of the Contents pane are some buttons for properties. Which properties are showing depends on what kinds of objects are being displayed in the Contents pane.
The colored button with the up or down arrow is the property which is being used for sorting. The arrow on the button shows whether the sort is in ascending or descending order.
How to sort: Click a button to sort based on that property. Click the same button again and the sort order is reversed. To return to the default sort order, click the Name button.
You must have some kind of sorting. No sorting at all would be a random list. That would be a bit difficult to work with!
In the Details view, shown in the illustration, these buttons actually name the columns of details about each item. In other views (see below) they are just buttons and do not line up with the icons.
You can choose which buttons to show at the top of the Contents pane
for a particular folder.
Pick which buttons appear: Right click on any of the buttons in the Contents pane and choose from the context menu that appears. The dialog Choose Details appears with a VERY long list of properties. The properties with a checkmark are the ones that will appear across the top of the Contents pane. Click on a box to check or uncheck it.
Change order of buttons: Select the name of a property in the
Choose Details dialog and use the
Move Up and Move Down buttons to change its position in the list. In the
Contents pane, the buttons are in the same order as in the list.
Right click a sorting button and a palette of choices appears. The choices you see depend on the property but will include Sort and Group at the top and, in Vista only, Stack by <the property> at the bottom. In the middle of the palette are some checkboxes. These let you choose to filter the display to show only items that match those rules, called criteria. For example you could filter for files that were modified yesterday or on a particular date.
Combining
filters: You can use more than one filter at a time. In the
illustration at the right, the Date modified and Type buttons have a check
mark. That means that we filtered on both of those properties. The Address
bar shows that we are searching for files from 5/26/2007 which also have
the file type of Configuration Settings. The sorting button for Name has
an up arrow, which tells us that what is left to show is sorted on Name in
ascending order.
Be careful about accidentally have more filters on than you meant to!
Windows Vista can group the items shown in the right pane. Some grouping choices appear automatically but you can also open a list of many more choices. The groups are divided by a horizontal line and are labeled with the group criteria and how many items there are in the group.
The illustration at the right
shows the Details view. The image will change when you click on the links
below.
Examples of group:
Name - Other, 0-9, A-H, I-P, Q-Z
Size - 0 KB, 0 - 10 KB, 10 - 100 KB, 100 KB - 1 MB, 1 MB - 16 MB, 16 MB - 128 MB...
Type - Application, Application extension, Cascading stylesheets, configuration settings, HTML, images, folders, Word documents, Excel documents...
Date modified - Today, Yesterday, Earlier this week, Earlier this year, A long time ago
Show in Stacks
(Only in Vista)
Stacking
is similar to grouping but each stack is shown as a separate icon. Double
click the icon to view the results. You can choose to stack based on any
property, just like grouping.
Stacking is actually a search. In the illustration, notice that the
selected item at the bottom of the folder tree is Search Results and the
Address bar shows Search Results in Windows. This is important since
Stacking only searches the folder that is current when you choose to show
the stacks. It is easy to lose track of what exactly you are looking at!
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~~ 1 Cor. 10:31 ...whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. ~~ |
Back
and Forward buttons: These buttons take you back and forth through the
list of folders or drives and web sites that you have displayed. The arrow
beside the Forward button opens a list of locations that you have
displayed lately. 
Address
box: This text box at the top of the Computer window shows the path to
whatever is selected in the panes below. You can also type a path in
yourself, like
in
the path opens a drop list of the other folders or drives at that level in
the folder tree.
Path in the old style: To see the old style for a path, like
Address
History: The down arrow
at the right end of the Address bar opens a history list of places that
Internet Explorer has been, both on your disks and on the Internet.
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