Chapter 7: Using Files and Folders

What Is Windows Explorer?

Windows Explorer is a versatile tool for viewing and manipulating files and folders. It appears whenever you choose Start | My Computer and you can also run it by choosing Start | All Programs | Accessories | Windows Explorer. The program has many features that you can display or hide, and several different views of the features it displays.

Windows Explorer is a twin of Internet Explorer, which is the Windows built-in Web browser. Running either program opens an Explorer window. The Explorer window is extremely versatile and has many parts, which you may or may not decide to display. When all parts of the Explorer window are made visible, it looks like Figure 7-2.

Figure 7-2: Anatomy of Explorer window. You can choose to display as many or as few of these components as you like.

The major parts of the Explorer window are

• The title bar Displays the name of the open folder and (optionally) the pathname (the list of the folders that contain the open folder).
• The menu bar and various toolbars You issue commands to Windows Explorer by clicking toolbar buttons or making selections off the menus.
• The working area Displays icons corresponding to all the files and folders contained in the open folder. The contents of subfolders don't appear in the working area.
• The status bar Displays information about the objects you select.
• The Task pane Presents easy ways to do tasks that Windows guesses you might want to do with the selected object.
• The Explorer bar In Figure 7-2 this is set to display the folder tree.

You can make the toolbars, Explorer bar, Task pane, or status bar appear or disappear. When the Explorer window is stripped down to its absolute minimum, the same folder in Figure 7-2 looks like this:

What Is the Address Box?

The Address box, which appears on the Address Bar toolbar of Windows Explorer, displays the name of the open folder. The Address box looks like this:

When you click the arrow at the right end of the Address box, a diagram appears. It displays the top levels of the folder tree, and allows "long-range navigation" by clicking any top-level item you want to open.

Another way to choose which folder to view is to type into the Address box the address of the file or folder you want to open. The Address box accepts file addresses, network addresses, and Web addresses. If your computer is online, you can open a Web page by typing its address into the Address box and clicking the Go button to the right of the Address box. Depending on what options you have chosen elsewhere, your computer may automatically dial up your Internet provider to open the Web page.

What Is the Standard Buttons Toolbar?

The Standard Buttons toolbar is an optional feature of Windows Explorer. Like most features of Windows Explorer, you can configure it to look the way you want. In the default configuration, it looks like this:

The three leftmost toolbar buttons are navigation buttons: Back, Forward, and Up. They behave like the corresponding Web-browser buttons. The Back button takes the window back to the previous folder it displayed, and the Forward button undoes Back. The Back and Forward buttons have arrows attached to them; clicking the arrow produces a drop-down list of locations to which you can go back or forward. Clicking the Up button causes the window to display the folder that contains the currently displayed folder; that is, it moves the window up the folder tree.

These buttons behave differently if you have configured Windows Explorer to open each folder in its own window.

The next two buttons--Search and Folders--are Explorer bar options. In Figure 7-2, for example, the Folders button has been clicked, and the Explorer bar displays the folder tree.

The Views button enables you to choose among several options for representing the contents of a folder. Right-clicking anywhere in the toolbar enables you to select which toolbars are shown. This menu is the same one you see by choosing View | Toolbars.

What Is the Links Toolbar?

The Links toolbar is a toolbar you can fill with links to files, Web sites, or applications. When you first install Windows XP, it contains buttons that connect to various Microsoft Web sites, but you can customize it to contain whatever links you find useful. It can look like this:

In this example, the bar contains links to four Web sites (CNN, Google, My Yahoo, and Amazon), an application (Notepad), and a folder (My Documents). If you have more items on the Links toolbar than can be displayed at one time, a double arrow appears at the right end of the Links toolbar. Clicking this arrow shows you a menu of the remaining links.

What Is the Explorer Bar?

The Explorer window usually contains a separate pane with additional information. Two things can appear there: the Explorer bar and the Task pane (which is described in the following section).

The Explorer bar provides a variety of tools to help you find files and get a higher-level view of how your files are organized. To change what you see in the Explorer bar, select an option from the View | Explorer Bar menu or click the corresponding button on the toolbar. The choices are

• Search Helps you find files or folders on your computer system, Web pages on the Internet, or people in a directory. To display it, choose View | Explorer Bar | Search (or press CTRL-E). You can also access the Search Explorer bar by selecting one of the options under Start | Search.
• Favorites Shows you a list of favorite files, folders, and Web sites. If you are online, clicking an entry for a Web site displays the site. In the default configuration, the Favorites button isn't on the toolbar, but you can always use the menu command View | Explorer Bar | Favorites (or press CTRL-I).
• Media Puts a media player into the Explorer bar and displays some links to WindowsMedia.com. Choose View | Explorer Bar | Media.
• History Displays a daily list to whatever files or Web sites you have opened in either Windows Explorer or Internet Explorer. To see it, choose View | Explorer Bar | History (or press CTRL-H).
• Folders Displays the folder tree. When the Explorer bar displays the folder tree, we call it the Folders Explorer bar. Choose View | Explorer Bar | Folders.

You can make the Explorer bar disappear by clicking the X in the upper-right corner of the Explorer bar or by clicking the selected (pressed in) button on the toolbar. You can resize the Explorer bar by dragging the boundary that separates it from the working area.

In the default configuration, only the Folders and Search Explorer bars have buttons on the toolbar. If you want other Explorer bars to have buttons, you can customize the toolbar.

What Is the Task Pane?

The Task pane (previously called the WebView pane in Windows Me) is a big blue column that sits between the working area and the Explorer bar. (If the Explorer bar isn't displayed, the Task pane occupies the left side of the window.) It has three major sections: Tasks, Other Places, and Details.

• Tasks Suggests some tasks that you may want to perform. Clicking the suggestion starts you on your way to carrying out the task. The Tasks box is context sensitive. For example, if you haven't selected any items in the working area, it offers you the option to create a new folder. But if you have already selected a folder, it suggests copying, moving, or deleting the selected folder. The exact response you get when you click a suggestion varies according to the difficulty of the task. Clicking the Throw Away This Folder suggestion, for example, takes you to a confirmation box; if you click Yes the folder is sent to the Recycle Bin. Publishing something on the Web is a more complicated task, so when you click the Publish This Folder To The Web suggestion, the Web Publishing Wizard opens to guide you through the process.

Depending on which folder you are looking at, the Tasks box may be called Folder Tasks, or you may see more than one Tasks box (for example, System Tasks and Folder Tasks).

• Other Places A list of folders that you may want to jump to. The list varies according to the folder you are currently looking at. For example, My Computer is often on this list, but not if you already have My Computer open.
• Details Shows you some of the properties of the selected object or objects, for example, the size of a file or when it was last modified. If the selected file is an image, the Details box contains a small picture of the image (called a thumbnail).

All of these boxes have arrows in their upper right-hand corners. An up arrow indicates that the box is currently expanded, and that you can contract it by clicking the arrow. A down arrow indicates that the box is contracted and that you can expand it by clicking the arrow.

If the Explorer window isn't wide enough to display both the Task pane and the Explorer bar, Windows omits the Task pane, and you have to close the Explorer bar to see it.

What Is the Status Bar?

The status bar is the bar at the very bottom of an Explorer window (and many other windows, too). It displays information about any selected object. When a file is selected, for example, the status bar shows the file's type and size. When a drive is selected, it displays the free space and capacity of the drive. When a folder is open and no object is selected, it tells you the number of objects in the folder and how many of them are hidden. To display it, choose View | Status Bar.

When you are connected to the Internet or another network, the right end of the status bar tells you the security zone of the open folder. If the folder is on your own computer, the My Computer icon is displayed.

What is a Tool Tip?

Many objects in the Explorer window have tool tips associated with them. A tool tip is a small yellow or white box that appears when you let the cursor linger over an object. Figure 7-2 shows the tool tip associated with a folder named WinXP. The tool tips of files or folders give some of the same information you could find in the Details box of the Task pane. The tool tips of toolbar buttons tell you the names of the buttons.

Where Is the Desktop Really? The Windows interface makes the desktop look as if it contains all your hard disks, floppies, CD-ROMs, and other storage devices. But the desktop is only a virtual object, not a piece of hardware; so where is the desktop folder stored? Each user has his or her own desktop folder. The shortcuts, files, and folders you move to the desktop are actually stored in the folder C:\Documents And Settings \username\Desktop (assuming that Windows XP is installed on C:).