This week, we’re exploring File Explorer and your many options for how the files and their details display.
On Monday, we learned about the Navigation pane. Click here to read that tip
Yesterday, we looked at your many options for choosing icons and showing details about files. Click here to read that tip
Today, we’ll learn about your options for displaying information about your files and sorting the files. We’ll start by opening File Explorer.
Click the View tab.
Your options for sorting files are on the top right of the File Explorer window.
We’ll begin by clicking on Sort by.
The drop-down menu offers you an almost overwhelming number of choices. Files can be sorted by Name or Date. You could select Type to sort by the kind of file, such as image or document or executable. Size can be helpful criteria if you’re perhaps looking to clear some space. You can also sort by Tags. Choosing Date created or Date modified can help you find older files or recently edited files. Date taken and Dimensions can help you find photos and images in the Pictures library. In the Documents library, you can also sort by Authors.
You can also choose between Ascending or Descending. For alphabetical listings this is the choice between A to Z or Z to A. For dates it’s the choice between oldest to newest or newest to oldest. For size, largest to smallest or smallest to largest.
The next option is to choose your Columns.
There are an amazing amount of options. You’ll see the basics like Name, Status, Date, and Type. There are also a bunch of other options that will be specific to certain kinds of file. For example, for pictures you could add focal length. For music you could add Album artist. To select a detail, put a check next to it. Uncheck, it you don’t care to see it.
You can also choose the priority of each detail by selecting Move Up or Move Down.
For example, right now Status is the first column, Name is second, Date is third.
If I move Status and Name down and Date up, it will look like this.
You can adjust the width of columns by typing in the pixels here. Or just hover at the top of columns until you get a handle and pull to adjust.
Now that we have that sorted out – sorry, couldn’t help myself – we can move on to grouping files tomorrow.