InformIT: Sams Teach Yourself Microsoft Windows XP in 24 Hours

Introducing the Windows Explorer

Often, Windows users call the Windows Explorer program just Explorer. You'll find Explorer listed on the Start menu system. Click the Start button to display the Start menu. Select More Programs, Accessories, and then select Windows Explorer. (Do not select Internet Explorer as that's your Internet browser.) The Windows Explorer window opens to look like the one shown in Figure 5.1. By default, Explorer opens to your My Documents folder located on your Windows disk drive. Your Explorer window might look somewhat different from the one in the figure. As Figure 5.1 shows, you can make Explorer point to any drive and folder, including a My Documents folder on a non-Windows drive if one exists. Simply type the location you wish to view in the Address bar.

Figure 5.1 Explorer's opening window shows folders and files.

Although the figure shows the Explorer screen fully maximized, you can run Explorer in a smaller window if you want something else to appear on your screen as well. In addition, your Explorer screen might differ slightly from the figures depending on your computer's files, disks, and theme.

You can replace the task area of your Explorer screen with a hierarchical overview of your computer system by selecting View, Explorer Bar, Folders. You will recognize many of the icon entries from your My Computer window. If a vertical scrollbar appears on the left window, scroll to see the rest of the hierarchical system tree. You can replace the task area once again by selecting View, Explorer Bar, Folders so that common tasks are available to you.

The right side of the Explorer window contains a pictorial overview of the contents of whichever device or folder you select in the left window. The overview might contain large or small icons or a list view, depending on the view you select.

As with the My Computer window, you can display a thumbnail view that shows a small version of any Web page or graphic file that appears in the Windows Explorer window. As you select different items (by clicking to open folders or by selecting from a displayed Explorer bar), the right window changes to reflect your changes. The task area contains tasks you'll often perform inside the Explorer window as well as quick links to other places you may need to see such as the My Computer window or your desktop.

The following To Do item guides you through an initial exploration of Explorer.

To Do: Working with Explorer

Start Windows Explorer.
Select View, Explorer Bar, Folders to display your computer disk drive hierarchy.
Scroll through the Explorer bar's hierarchy until you see the icon for the C: drive in the window.
If you see a plus sign next to your C: icon in the left window (you might have to scroll the window's scrollbar to see the C: icon), click the plus sign to display the contents of the C: drive. The plus becomes a minus sign, and the left window opens the C: icon showing the list of folders and documents on the C: drive. Click the drive's minus sign again to close the window. Click once more to turn the plus to a minus and watch the right window. As you change between these two views of the C: drive (detailed and overview), watch the right window.

Click the highest level in the left window, labeled Desktop, and Windows XP displays the contents of your desktop in the right window.
Click the C: icon to display the contents of the C: drive. Depending on the contents and size of your C: drive, the right window can contain a few or many document files.
Press Alt+V to open the View menu on the menu bar. Select Toolbar to display a list of tools you can display on your toolbar. Whatever you know about other windows applies to the Explorer window. For example, you can add text labels to the toolbar icons if you right-click the toolbar and select Customize.
Type a Web address inside the Address Bar's textbox to replace the contents of your Explorer window with a Web page. Press Back to return to the Explorer window. As you can see, Windows XP attempts to blur the distinction between your computer and the online world. Whether data is on your hard disk or on the disk of a computer across the globe, Explorer gives you quick access.
Select View, Details. Windows XP Explorer displays the items in a detailed format that describes the name, type, and modified date of each item. Actually, given the detail that you normally have by using Explorer, you will almost always want to display the right window in this detailed list view. When you work with files, you will often need to know their size, type, or last modified date.

Click Name, the title of the first detailed column in the right window. Watch the window's contents change as you then click Modified. Explorer sorts the display to appear in date order (earliest first). Click Modified again and Explorer displays the items in reverse date order from the oldest to the most recent. If you click any column twice in a row, Windows sorts the column in reverse order. You can always sort columns in order or reverse order by clicking the column's name when working in a columnar Windows window.
If you want to see more of one of Explorer's windows, you can drag the edge of the left window pane (the pane marked Folders) left or right. For example, if you want the left window to be smaller to make room for more large icons, drag the right edge of the Folders pane to the left and release the mouse when the left window is as small as you want it. (Remember that the mouse cursor changes shape when you place it at the proper position on the dividing column.) Figure 5.2 shows the Explorer screen with the Explorer bar and no task window. Perhaps you'll prefer this configuration over the Task pane appearing. You'll learn which window configuration works best for you as you gain more experience with Explorer.

Figure 5.2 Make more room by closing the Folders window pane and changing the view.
Click the toolbar's Folders button to see the Folders pane once again. As you can see, the Folders button quickly changes between the Explorer bar and your Task pane.

Explorer does not update the display every time you resize a window or change the size of the Folders pane. Therefore, if you enlarge the right window while in an icon view, Explorer does not automatically rearrange the right window's icons to fill up the newly enlarged space. You will almost always want to select View, Refresh after modifying Explorer's window sizes because Refresh analyzes any changes you've made to your disk while inside Explorer and updates the Explorer window. Perform Refresh when you open Explorer in a window and then add or delete files from another window.

The Explorer environment is always updating itself to reflect your current actions. Therefore, the right-click menu commands change, depending on whether you select a text document, folder, sound document, graphics document, disk drive, or network drive. Click a folder and right-click to see the menu that appears. Now, right-click over a document file to see a slightly different menu. The actions you might want to perform on a document are often different from the actions you might want to perform on a folder, and the menu reflects those differences. The right-click's pop-up menus are context-sensitive, so they contain only the options you can use at the time.

Many Explorer users copy files to and from disk drives and other kinds of drives, such as networked drives.

You can use Explorer to copy and move individual files or multiple files at once. Often, you want to put one or more files from work on a diskette to use on your home computer for weekend overtime. (Sure, you want to do that a lot!)

To select a Windows file (called a document, remember), click that document. To select more than one document at a time, hold down the Ctrl key while clicking each document that you want to select. You can select folders, as well as documents. When you select a folder and other document files to copy to a disk, for example, Windows XP copies all the document files within the folder, as well as the other document files you've selected, to the disk. Figure 5.3 shows an Explorer screen with several document files and a folder selected. The File, Send To command (from the right-click pop-up menu) is about to send those files to the disk in the A: drive. The Send To command is useful for sending copies of selected files and folders to a disk, a fax recipient, or one of several other destinations you've set up.

Figure 5.3 Select multiple documents and folders if you need to copy several at a time.

When you want to move or copy a file to another location (the Send To command works only for diskettes and other nonhard disk devices), select the file (or select a group of files) in the right window and drag while holding down the right mouse button to the folder or disk where you want to move or copy the file. Windows opens a pop-up menu when you release the files from which you can select a move or copy operation.
Rename files and folders if you need to by selecting the file or folder and pressing the F2 shortcut key. (F2 is the shortcut for the File, Rename menu command.) Windows XP highlights the name, so you can edit or enter a new name. When you press Enter, Windows XP saves the new name.

The strength of Explorer is that your entire computer system appears in the left window at all times. When you want to drag a document or folder to a different directory on a completely different drive (or even to another computer on the network if you are connected to a network), the target disk drive always appears in the left window. As long as you've clicked the disk drive's plus sign to display that disk's directories, you can drop a file into that directory from elsewhere in the system.

The Explorer Options | Next Section

Previous Section