Open any Windows application and take a look at its Open and Save As dialog boxes. Notice how they look pretty much like the dialog boxes in any other application? That’s because Microsoft provides programmers with a set of common dialog boxes. Any programmer may  use these pre-designed dialog boxes to provide standard file management for their application. In fact, Microsoft encourages programmers to use the common dialogs in order to give Windows users a more consistent experience from one app to another.

You may have observed that in Windows 7, that single dialog box approach seems to have been derailed. That’s because some applications still use the old Windows XP dialog boxes instead of the revamped Windows 7 version. The most obvious difference between the two styles of dialog box is that XP’s rather restrictive Places bar is replaced by a more extensive navigation pane in the newer dialogs.

One of the features which has remained consistent – but not obvious – from XP to Windows 7, is the availability of right-click options within the file dialog boxes.

Right-click shortcuts

Give it a try:

1. Open an application and then press Ctrl-O, or click the Open icon, to display the Open dialog box.
2. Right-click any of the files or folders displayed in that dialog and you’ll see a context menu pop open. This is the same context menu you’ll find in Explorer windows.

From that context menu, you can perform all sorts of file tasks, from renaming or deleting a file to scanning it with your anti-virus software.

So while you normally use the Open or Save As dialogs simply to open or save a file, you can, in fact, achieve a whole lot more through them.

This is useful for a variety of tasks:

• Deleting unwanted files;
• Quickly performing a task you’d otherwise perform later, such as converting a document to a PDF;
• Scanning a file for viruses;
• Playing an MP3 music file (or, if you have WinAmp installed, you can queue a whole folder full of audio files to play);
• Adding a folder to a Windows Library;
• Performing a variety of on-the-fly actions when you notice something which needs changing, such as a filename.

The exact options you have available will depend on the software installed on your computer. For instance, you won’t be able to do PDF conversions unless you have Acrobat or another PDF program installed.

Limitations and extensions

There are some limitations on what you can do via the dialog boxes, too. For example, if you’re working on a document in Microsoft Word and you open the ‘Save As’ dialog box, you won’t be able to right-click another Word document and select Open to open it for editing as well. That’s because the dialog box you’re using has focus, meaning you have to close it before you can do anything else within Word.

There’s nothing stopping you from opening a document within another program, however. For example, you can open an Excel spreadsheet from within Word’s ‘Save As’ dialog box.

1. Press F12 in Word to open the ‘Save As’ dialog box.
2. You’ll note that the only files displayed are those you can edit in Word, such as .docx, .doc, .pdf, .txt and so on. To display Excel files, type *.xls or *.xlsx in the ‘File Name’ box and press Enter. (If you prefer to display all files, type *.* in the ‘File Name’ box and press Enter.)
3. Right-click an .xls file and select Open from the context menu to open it in Excel. While you’re editing the Excel spreadsheet, your Word dialog box will remain open, patiently awaiting your return. In fact, you could perform the same trick within Excel, opening a JPEG image for editing from within the Excel ‘Save As’ dialog box, in true babushka doll fashion.

Microsoft Word lets you perform another handy trick via the file dialog box: you can copy the contents of one document into another one.

1. Press F12 to display the ‘Save As’ dialog box.
2. Right-click any Word document and select Copy.
3. Click Cancel to close the dialog box.
4. Press Ctrl-V to paste the contents of the file into the document you’re currently editing.

Note that this technique doesn’t work if you try it with any other type of file or in most other programs; either nothing happens or you end up inserting the file itself — not the contents of the file — into the document you’re editing.

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“Don’t you hit Ctrl-S all the time?” I asked. To my surprise, not only did she not use Ctrl-S, but not one person in the group knew that that’s all it takes to save your work. Ctrl-S. Hold down the Control key and tap the S key. On a Mac, the equivalent is Command-S.

I’ve always assumed that everyone knows this shortcut, but clearly that’s not the case; and if it wasn’t the case for a group of my friends, I assume that some of you reading this are also in the dark.

Saving is effortless

The beauty of Ctrl-S is that it’s almost effortless. No need to take your fingers off the keyboard, no need to interrupt the flow of your thoughts or disrupt your writing, no need to manipulate your mouse and seek out a menu. Just type away, hit Ctrl-S, type away, hit Ctrl-S, and so on.

This keyboard combo works in most applications, including all Microsoft Office apps, Adobe and Corel apps, browsers and so on, so it’s almost always available.

Of course, the first time you save a document, you’ll have to go through the process of naming it and deciding in which folder to store it, but after you’ve accomplished that onerous task, saving any further work is a no-brainer with Ctrl-S.

A safer approach to your work

After a further round of questioning with our fireside group, I discovered that all of them follow this process when working on a document:

• Create a new document and start working in it.
• After typing a page or two or working for about 30 minutes, allow the thought “Oh, I guess I should save this” to bubble up.
• Save and name the document.
• Continue working until the task is finished or some major interruption, such as the end of the workday, occurs.
• Save once more and close the document.

This is a recipe for disaster. If you work like this, you are courting misery. A far more secure approach, one which takes not a whit more effort, is this:

• Create your document and immediately save it, giving it a name.
• Start working in the document and press Ctrl-S every few minutes.
• When you’ve finished working, press Ctrl-S a final time and close your document.

Using this approach, the most you can lose is a few minutes of work. Give it a try – it only takes a day or so to turn it into a habit.

How often should I save?

So, what does “press Ctrl-S every few minutes” really mean?

When determining how often to press Ctrl-S, I perform a pain-of-loss assessment: I ask myself, “How painful would it be if I had to reconstruct that last paragraph?” “That last sentence?” “That column of numbers?” The instant I think, “I’d hate to have to redo that”, I press Ctrl-S. Remember, your computer doesn’t mind if you press Ctrl-S a dozen times a minute, so there’s no reason not to overindulge yourself in this little bit of security.

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A service pack is like a giant first-aid kit for an operating system: Microsoft rolls up hundreds of bug fixes, patches and plugs for security holes into a single package, tosses in some new features, and delivers it in a multi-megabyte update.

Usually, I advise people to wait a while before installing a service pack, just in case the service pack delivers its own set of problems. But SP1 for Windows 7 is unlike any previous service pack in one significant way: it’s almost a non-event. Really there’s very little in here to write home about. The few major changes it contains will be of interest to network administrators and folk in large companies, but for the rest of us, it’s entirely humdrum.

What a welcome change this is! It is proof of how good Windows 7 is and how, from the start, Microsoft got most things right with this operating system. That’s not to say there aren’t problems with Windows 7, but all in all, it’s a solid, reliable operating system. You certainly couldn’t say that about its predecessor. Vista was almost unbearable to use until its first service pack was released and, even then, it still needed major fixing up with later service packs.

Although SP1 doesn’t deliver anything exciting, it’s still definitely worth installing. By installing it, you’ll ensure that your system is fully up to date and with known security issues fixed. You may also find, as I did, that the service pack makes your system run a little better. I found that it addressed several little niggly problems I thought I’d have to live with forever.

The size of the SP1 download varies depending on your computer's configuration.

Back up first

SP1 may not be a major update in terms of content, but installing it is still a major process. It replaces a bunch of core windows files and the whole update will take from 30 to 90 minutes, depending on your system.

Whenever you install a service pack, you should take the precaution of backing up your data – your whole system if you’re being cautious – before you proceed. For most people, the process will be smooth sailing, but it’d be sad if you were the rare one who encounters a problem and you have no recent backup.

Also, make sure you have enough disk space to proceed. Depending on your system, you’ll need between 750 megabytes and around a gigabyte to install it using Windows Update (and up to 7.4 gigabytes if you use the standalone download method). You can use Disk Cleanup to clear out files you no longer need:

1. Click Start, type disk cleanup in the search box, and click Disk Cleanup in the results list.
2. Select your system drive (almost always C:) in the Drive Selection dialog box and click OK. Disk Cleanup will search your system for files it can delete.
3. Tick (check) each of the items you wish to delete and click OK.

Installing SP1

To install SP1:

1. Close all other programs.
2. Run Windows Update (click Start, type windows update and press Enter).
3. Click the ‘Important updates are available’ link, tick Windows 7 Service Pack 1 in the list and click OK.

If you tick the option to ‘Automatically restart the computer’ you can leave your computer unattended while the update is in progress.

Testing

After you install SP1, try it out on your system for a few days. If everything seems to be working okay and disk space is tight, you can use Disk Cleanup to delete the backup files, which consume somewhere between a half a gigabyte and a gigabyte of space. To remove the SP1 backup files, you’ll need to take an extra step when you use Disk Cleanup.

1. Click Start, type disk cleanup in the search box, and click Disk Cleanup in the results list.
2. Select your system drive  in the Drive Selection dialog box and click OK.
3. When the Disk Cleanup for System dialog box is displayed, click the ‘Clean up system files’ button. This will search for additional items, including the Service Pack backups.
4. When the list of files to delete is displayed, tick ‘Service pack backup files’ and then click OK.

Uninstalling SP1

If you find a problem with your system after you’ve installed SP1, it’s possible to uninstall it provided you have not run Disk Cleanup in the meantime.

To uninstall SP1:

1. Click Start -> Control Panel -> Programs -> Programs and Features -> View Installed Updates.
2. Click ‘Service Pack for Microsoft Windows (KB 976932)’ and click Uninstall.

If the service pack is greyed out in the list, you won’t be able to uninstall it. In that case, the only way to remove the service pack is to reinstall Windows 7.

When you can’t install SP1

Sometimes the installation itself doesn’t work. For example, I ran into a problem where the service pack download failed each time it reached 18 percent. A quick Google search showed that others were experiencing the same problem.

If you encounter something similar, try rebooting your modem and router:

1. Switch off your computer.
2. Remove the power cords from your modem and your router.
3. Wait a minute or so.
4. Reconnect your modem and wait for all the lights to cycle (it usually takes about a minute).
5. Reconnect your router and wait for its lights to cycle (about another minute).
6. Turn your computer back on.

Now try the download once more.

If Windows Update still fails, give the Windows Update troubleshooter a whirl:

1. Click Start -> Control Panel and type ‘troubleshooter’ in the search box.
2. Click Troubleshooting and then, in the System and Security section, click ‘Fix problems with Windows Update’.

Finally, try installing and running the System Update Readiness Tool.

Manual installation

Click Start, right-click Computer and select Properties to check whether SP1 has been installed on your computer.

If you still can’t download the service pack using Windows Update, try a manual download of the standalone version. If you have a 32-bit computer, download windows6.1-KB976932-X86.exe; if you have a 64-bit computer, download windows6.1-KB976932-X64.exe. (If you don’t know whether your computer is 32 or 64-bits, click Start, right-click Computer and select Properties, and check your ‘system type’.)

If you use the standalone installation package, make sure you first install Windows Update KB2454826, from update.microsoft.com, before installing SP1.

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It’s a handy feature, but it doesn’t always get you what you need. Sometimes, your search will uncover multiple files with the same or similar names, with no obvious way to figure out which is the one you want. At other times, you won’t want to edit the file you’re searching for, but instead you’ll want to be able to open the folder where it’s stored and work with the file together with other files in that folder.

Open File Location

Fortunately, there’s a simple way to accomplish this. Instead of clicking a matching file in the search results, right-click the file and choose Open File Location. Windows will then open the folder in which the file is contained. With a quick glance you should be able to tell if this is the file you need. If it is, with the folder open you can edit the file, copy, rename or delete it, or work with other files in the folder.

File location variants

You can use this technique or something similar in a number of places in Windows. For instance, if you download a file from the Internet using the Firefox browser, before closing the Downloads window, you can right-click a file and choose Open Containing Folder – handy when you’ve forgotten the default location for downloads.

Or, when you’re viewing a file in a Windows 7 Library, you can right-click it and select Open File Location to open the actual folder where the file is stored, instead of viewing it in a Library “pseudo folder”.

You can even use this technique in programs such as Picasa. Right-click any image in your Picasa library (or click the image and press Ctrl+Enter) and choose Locate On Disk to open the folder which contains the original image.

These simple techniques can save you minutes every day, and those minutes add up.

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Use any public Picasa web album for your desktop wallpaper feed.

If you’re a wallpaper devotee, you’ve probably already scouted out many of the sites and services offering additional wallpaper, either free or for a price, such as Webshots and Windows7 Wallpapers. What you may not realise is that Windows 7 lets you download your wallpaper from an RSS feed. That means you can get a stream of wallpapers from any photo blog or website with a feed. The one restriction – apart from observing copyright permissions – is that the feed must wrap the photos in an enclosure. That restriction eliminates a fair number of sites, but there are plenty more to choose from. If your friends or family use Picasa Web Albums, for example, you can pull photos from any of their public web albums directly onto your desktop.

Modifying a theme

Windows 7 .theme files are simply text files containing a list of settings.

1. Click Start, type %localappdata% in the search box and press Enter.
2. Open the Microsoft sub-folder, then the Windows sub-folder, then the Themes sub-folder and finally the Australia sub-folder. In that folder, you’ll find a sub-folder containing the wallpaper images used by the theme, plus the Australia.theme file.
3. Click Australia.theme to select it, press Ctrl+C to copy the file to the clipboard, close the folder window and on the desktop press Ctrl+V to place a copy there.
4. Rename this file New England.txt. Click Yes when you see the warning about changing the file extension – theme files are, infact, plain text files.
5. Double-click New England.txt to open it in Notepad. Don’t be intimidated by the cryptic list of settings you see; you’re going to make a few simple edits and leave all the rest alone.
6. In the [Theme] section change the DisplayName value to New England.
7. Locate the [Control Panel\Desktop] section and set TileWallpaper=0 and Wallpaperstyle=0.
8. Locate the [Slideshow] section and delete the entire ImagesRootPIDL setting including the long string of cryptic characters after it. You should be left with only two settings in the Slideshow section, Interval=1800000 and Shuffle=0 (the values for those settings may be different if you’ve changed the default theme settings at all).
9. Add the following line to the [Slideshow] section:
   RssFeed= http://tinyurl.com/rv-new-england
   (Make sure there’s no space between the equals sign and the words.)
10. Close New England.txt and save your changes, then rename the file to New England.theme.
11. Double-click New England.theme. The Personalization explorer will open and you’ll be asked whether you want to subscribe to the rss feeds. Click Download Attachments then close the Personalization explorer.

That’s it. At first you’ll see one of the Australian wallpapers on your desktop. Windows needs to download the images from the RSS feed in the background, so wait a half a minute (longer if you have a slow Internet connection) and then right-click the desktop and select ‘Next desktop background’ from the context menu. You should see the first of the downloaded images centred on your desktop. You can check that the images are downloading properly by reopening the Personalization explorer and clicking Desktop Background. You should see the images, 17 in all, displayed.

Try this technique with other feeds, changing the name of the .theme file and the DisplayName and RssFeed values as needed. For instance, if you’re a fan of NASA’s image of the day, use either of these URLs in the RssFeed setting:

http://www.nasa.gov/rss/lg_image_of_the_day.rss (for large images)
http://www.nasa.gov/rss/image_of_the_day.rss (for small images)

Because NASA publishes one image a day, you’ll start off with a single image in your NASA theme.

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The breadcrumb bar provides a visual indication of the path you’ve followed to get to your current location.

Take a look at Figure 1, which shows an XP path above and a Windows 7 breadcrumb trail below. At first glance, the differences don’t seem too great. The drive name (C:\) is omitted and XP’s backslashes are replaced by arrows in Windows 7. The top folder names are a little different, too, but otherwise the paths look fairly similar.

Figure 1.

This apparent similarity masks two important differences:

• The XP pathname tells you your precise location in the folder hierarchy: disk, folder and sub-folder. Windows 7’s breadcrumbs indicate the trail you followed through the woods, as it were, in order to get to your current location. This difference becomes more apparent if you take a look at Figure 2. It shows a breadcrumb trail to the same location (the Cognitive Sciences sub-sub-sub-etc-folder) via a different trail through the woods: Instead of starting in Libraries, this second trail starts from the Network, digs down into the computer (named ‘Velociraptor), and then into the Documents folder and its sub-folders. Same destination, different route.
• The XP pathname is purely informational and static; it does nothing more than tell you where you are. Windows 7’s breadcrumb trail is interactive; it not only tells you your location, it also allows you to jump to any part of the trail you’ve followed, or to other related locations.

Breadcrumb navigation has become increasingly popular, not only in operating systems and applications, but also on the web. In Windows 7, you’ll find breadcrumb navigation in file open and save dialogs as well as in Explorer windows.

Figure 2.

Breadcrumb navigation

The real power of the breadcrumb bar is its interactivity:

• Click any of the ‘crumbs’ to jump immediately to that location.
• Click the arrow to the right of a crumb and you’ll see a drop-down list of sub-folders, with the currently opened folder highlighted in bold text.
• Click any item in the drop-down list to open it.
• The arrow to the left of the first crumb in the trail displays a list of root locations: your user folder, the desktop, Libraries, Homegroup, Network, Computer, and Recycle Bin. To the left of that, abutting the browser-style backwards and forwards buttons, is a drop-down arrow providing a list of locations you’ve visited recently. Click any item in the list to return there.
• Click the arrow at the right-hand end of the breadcrumb bar to open the Previous Locations list. It shows the pathnames or addresses of folders, Control Panel applets and websites you’ve opened. Clicking any item opens that item.

Crumb tips

If you’ve wormed your way down through multiple folders and can no longer see the full breadcrumb trail, you’ll notice a chevron replacing the left-most arrow. Click the chevron to reveal the starting crumbs in your trail, with a list of root locations beneath.

If you’d like to know the actual pathname to your current location, click in any blank space on the breadcrumb bar and you’ll see an old-style path; click anywhere in the folder window to redisplay the breadcrumbs. To use that pathname in a document or shortcut, right-click the breadcrumb bar and choose Copy Address As Text from the pop-up menu; this copies the full path to the clipboard.

A more interesting, if misleadingly named, right-click option is Copy Address. You can use this option to copy an entire folder from one location to another, or to create a quick desktop shortcut. For example, try this:

1. Navigate to a folder that contains several documents.
2. Right-click the breadcrumb bar and select Copy Address.
3. Minimize the open folder, right-click the desktop and choose Paste from the pop-up menu. A copy of the folder and all its contents will be placed on your desktop.
4. Right-click the desktop and choose Paste Shortcut from the pop-up menu. A shortcut to the selected folder will be placed on the desktop.

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