Organizing Files and Information : Arranging Data in Windows Explorer

You can adjust the display of any individual folder's contents by using the Change Your View menu, which appears on the right side of the toolbar throughout Windows Explorer. As Figure 1 shows, this menu is significantly changed from its Windows XP predecessor and also offers one noteworthy change over its equivalent in Windows Vista.

The choice at the bottom of the list, Content, is new in Windows 7. It's intended primarily for use with search results, and in the case of documents, it shows a fairly lengthy snippet of text with the matching search terms highlighted.

The three view options above Content—Tiles, Details, and List—offer icons and text listings of a fixed size and layout. The choices at the top of the menu allow you to display the folder's contents as icons of varying sizes. In Windows 7, as in Windows Vista, this menu includes a slider that allows you to move smoothly between icon sizes instead of being restricted to the predefined sizes. At medium sizes and above, the operating system displays thumbnails—previews of file or folder contents—if it finds something to display. This effect is most noticeable in folders dedicated to digital media, where you'll find cover art for albums and small but recognizable images of digital photos.

The range of options for the various icon views is not infinite. Although there are four dis crete choices available on the Change Your View menu, ranging from Small to Extra Large, the actual number of sizes is 76. You can cycle smoothly through all 76 sizes by choosing Small Icons from the View menu and then holding down the Control key as you use the wheel on your mouse (or the Up Arrow key) to step upward through the list. With each step, you'll see the icons shift to a new, larger size (although at some of the smaller sizes the change is barely perceptible).

Your other option to customize the display of objects in a file folder is to adjust the headings that are visible for that folder. In Windows 7, these headings are visible only in Details view, although you can access them using a right-click shortcut menu in other views. As we'll see in the next section, these headings are key to sorting and grouping a folder's contents and to arranging those contents.

Initially, all folders intended for the storage of user data (including those you create) are assigned one of five folder templates. These templates define the default headings that Windows Explorer considers appropriate for the content type. These headings are used atop columns in the Details view and are available on the Sort By menu in all other views. The logic is straightforward: you'll probably want to sort a folder full of MP3 tracks by track number, but that column would be superfluous in a folder full of Microsoft Office Word documents. And the Date Taken column is extremely useful for filtering digital photos but isn't much use with any other kinds of data.

Table 1 lists the default column headings available in each of these five templates. It also lists additional headings that you can add easily by right-clicking any heading in the Details view.

If the set of default headings and additional headings isn't enough, you can choose headings for other properties from an enormously long list in the Choose Details dialog box. To display this dialog box, switch to Details view, right-click the currently visible column headings and choose More from the bottom of the menu. If column headings aren't visible, tap the Alt key, choose View from the menu bar, and then click Choose Details. Using this dialog box, shown in Figure 2, you can show or hide headings by selecting or clearing check boxes; you can also use the Move Up and Move Down buttons to change the order in which headings appear.

Although the Choose Details dialog box includes a Width Of Selected Column field, you'll probably find it easier to make size adjustments directly, with the mouse. Drag the divider between columns to adjust a column's width.

1. Sorting, Filtering, and Grouping

1.1. Sorting, Filtering, and Grouping

Regardless of the view settings you've chosen for a folder, you can adjust the way its contents are displayed at any time by changing the sort order, filtering the contents to include only selected items based on one or more properties, and grouping and arranging the contents by a particular heading. These arrangements are not saved as part of the view for a folder, but the result can be dragged to the Favorites group in the navigation pane and saved for recall.

In any view, these options are available by right-clicking anywhere in the contents pane and choosing a Sort By or Group By option. In most cases, however, these actions are easier to accomplish using the column headings directly by switching to Details view, which is also the preferred way to filter.

Sorting a Folder's Contents To sort a folder in Details view, click the heading that you want to use as a sort key. For example, to sort by Date Modified, click the Date Modified heading. Click again on the same heading to reverse the sort order. The current sort order is indicated by a faint blue highlight on the column heading, with an up or down arrow above the heading name to indicate whether the sort is in ascending or descending order.

In all other views, right-click any empty space in the contents pane and select a value from the Sort By menu. A bullet next to Ascending or Descending indicates the current sort order; choose the other option to reverse the sort order.

Filtering Folder Contents In Details view only, you can use headings to filter the contents of a folder. If you rest your mouse pointer on a heading, a drop-down arrow appears at the right. Clicking the arrow reveals a set of filter check boxes appropriate for that heading; in some cases (the Type heading, for example, as shown in Figure 3), the filter list is built on the fly from the contents of the current file list.

Select any check box to add that item to the filter list; clear the check box for an item to remove it from the filter. After you filter the list in Details view, you can switch to any other view and the filter will persist. (Look in the address bar to see the specific filter applied, and click the previous breadcrumb to remove all filtering without switching back to Details view.)

If you filter by Size, you get a set of choices based on the file sizes that Windows deems appropriate, given the current folder contents, as shown here:

A filter can use multiple check boxes and multiple headings. So, for example, you could filter a picture folder based on ratings as well as a "date taken" value, resulting in a file list like this one:

When a folder is filtered, check marks appear to the right of headings used for filtering (see the Rating and Date Taken headings in the preceding illustration). The values on which you have filtered (for example, the specific tags) appear in the address bar.

When you select multiple check boxes in the same heading, Windows Explorer displays items that match any of the selected check boxes. When you select filtering check boxes from two or more separate headings, however, Windows Explorer displays only items that satisfy the criteria applied to each heading (in Boolean terms, it uses the conjunction AND between the headings).

Filtering a folder actually kicks off a specialized search, with the current folder designated as the search scope. If the filtered folder contains subfolders, you will see at the bottom of the list of results an invitation to Search Again In Subfolders, which reruns the search in those locations (and discards any results from the current folder).

Grouping Folder Contents If sorting and filtering don't give you enough ways to organize or locate files, try grouping. Grouping generates a display comparable to the one shown in Figure 4.

When you group, Windows Explorer collects all the items that have some common property, displaying each group under a heading that can be expanded or collapsed in most views. List view offers a particularly interesting perspective, with each group of results appearing under a column heading. The grouped arrangement is saved as part of the custom view settings for that folder; the next time you open the folder, it will still be grouped.

Inside Out: Remove grouping from a folder