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Windows XP: The new views

Windows XP provides a bunch of new ways to view and organise your files.

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Topic links:

group 'em

categorising files

my documents' new location

 

One of the most appealing aspects of XP's interface is the many different ways it lets you view and organise your files. It provides rough equivalents for the five views provided in Windows 98/Me, with some welcome additions and improvements.

The six XP views are:

List View. This shows a list of files and folders, with a small icon plus the file or folder's name. List View is useful for displaying folders which contain many files, as it compresses a lot of information into a small space.

(Click any of the thumbnail images to see a full-size screenshot.)

Icons View. This view replaces the old Small Icons view. It displays a mid-sized icon for each file or folder.

Tile View. This view replaces the old Large Icons view, displaying a large icon for each file or folder. It's something of a space waster, so you're only likely to use it in folders which contain few files.

Thumbnails View. Thumbnails View displays an even larger icon for each file and folder than Tile View. But it goes one step further and displays a small-scale image instead of an icon for graphics files and folders containing images, making it very useful for previewing image files.

Filmstrip View. This view is only available in picture folders, such as My Pictures, Shared Pictures and other folders based on the Pictures or Photo Album folder templates (see technote below). It lets you view your photos in a strip across the bottom of the folder, with the selected file shown enlarged above. Controls let you navigate through your photos and rotate the selected image left or right. Note that rotating an image actually alters your original file, replacing it with the rotated image.

geekgirl.technote: Applying a template to a folder

Windows XP uses templates to designate folders for specific purposes. There are half a dozen templates available, designed to be used with audio, image or video files. To apply a folder template to an existing folder: Right-click the folder and select Properties from the pop-up menu. Click the Customize tab. Select a template from the drop-down Use This Folder Type As A Template list

Details View. Like List View, Details Views shows small icons with file and folder names. In addition, it lets you see additional information depending on the type of folder, arranged in columns. For standard document folders the Details View shows the file size, type and date modified by default. For music files it displays filename, size, type, artist, album title, year recorded, track number and duration. For picture files it shows name, size, type, date modified, date picture taken and dimensions (resolution). You can move any of the columns by clicking-and-dragging the column title from its current location to another column. You also have complete control over the columns displayed in any folder: Simply open the folder and select Choose Details from the View Menu to see a list of 32 different categories, including such esoteric details as Camera Used, Bit Rate and Product Version. Clearly some of these details will be meaningless for some files, but if you have a mess of files all tumbled in together in a folder, the details view coupled with a snazzy new feature called Show In Groups, can turn the mess into beautiful order.

Group 'em

Show In Groups is one of those subtle new touches which adds so much to Windows XP. It works in conjunction with the various file views and goes hand in hand with file sorting. It really comes into its own when used with the Details View.

Here's a good way to experiment with it:

1. Open a folder containing multiple files, preferably of different filetypes.
2. Right-click in an empty spot and choose Views from the pop-up menu, then select any view except List View.
3. Right-click once more and choose Arrange Icons By -> Show In Groups from the pop-up menu.
4. Now right-click again, select Arrange Icons By and choose any of the different sort options (name, size, et cetera) to change the sort order.
5. Experiment with different views by right-clicking and choosing Views and then choosing any of the view except List View.

In standard folders, Show In Groups provides an easy way to categorise your files and get a handle on the contents with a single glance. It works even better in audio and picture folders, where it gives you a whole different way of organising your files.

Step-by-step: Categorising your files

1. XP's Show In Groups option gives a quick snapshot of the contents of a folder and helps you sort out your documents. For example, here you can see the Details View using Arrange By Type and Show In Groups.

2. Use the Arrange Icons By right-click option to sort your files by different criteria and quickly switch perspectives. The available criteria change according to the folder type.

3. For example, by choosing Arrange Icons By Modified, you can quickly tell which files you've been working on recently and which have remained untouched for weeks, months or years.

4. Things get a lot more interesting if you use XP's extended file properties to categorise files. To categorise a file, right-click it and choose Properties from the pop-up menu, click the Summary tab, and type a word or phrase in the Category box. For example, you could categorise your word processing documents as correspondence, reports, proposals, essays and so on. It takes a little extra effort to categorise files, especially as XP doesn't let you change the category property on multiple files simultaneously, but it pays offs later on.

5. To take advantage of your categories, flip over to Details View, select Choose Details from the View Menu, and add the Category column to the view.

6. Now right-click in the folder and choose Arrange Icons By -> Category, making sure the Show In Groups option is also selected. The result is instant organisation. This method provides a useful alternative to divvying up your files into sub-folders; instead, you can have large groups of files easily accessible in a single folder and still maintain order.

 

geekgirl.technote: My Documents' new location

Noticed something odd about My Documents? It no longer lives in the root folder of your main drive. If you're trying to track it down, look instead in \Documents and Settings\username\My Documents. There's a reason for this shift. XP makes it much easier for multiple users to share a single computer and its design incorporates this multi-user philosophy. Each user has his or her own My Documents folder. That means the My Documents shortcut on the Start Menu points to a different location depending on who's currently logged in. So, if Tomasina, Dana and Harriet share the same computer, when Dana is logged on My Documents will open: \Documents and Settings\Dana\My Documents When Harriet is logged on, it will open: \Documents and Settings\Harriet\My Documents If you want to share documents or folders with other users of the same computer, place them in the \Shared Documents folder (\Documents and Settings\All Users\Shared Documents) instead of My Documents.

© 2002  Rose Vines

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