An Introduction To Windows Vista Explorer

If you’ve spent any time organizing your folders and files in Windows XP or any other version of Windows, you’ve most likely used Windows Explorer in some fashion or even a third-party folder and file management system.

The Windows Vista Explorer is a folder and file management tool built into Windows Vista. Explorer has been updated with some new features as well as new looks. See image below.

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This is the default view of Explorer in Vista Home Premium. I’ve highlighted some of the main areas which include:

• The Address Bar – Tells you where you are at and where you’re going. Explorer now has a breadcrumb trail feature which is very nice. If you don’t know what a breadcrumb trail is, make sure you check back here at my blog when I provide more information on Explorer.
• The Search Box – Allows you to search through your folders and files.
• The Command Bar – Allows you to keep some of your most commonly used tasks you might perform in Explorer.
• The Navigation Pane – Allows you to highlight and move quickly between various folders and locations on your computer. You can add and remove various items from the navigation pane.
• The Details Pane – Show more details about the item that is highlighted. Also allows you to provide tags that you can use in you searches as well. More to come on that.

The Search Box

The Search Box is where you can search for what you’re looking for. This is new for Windows and as a basic search, works wonderfully just by typing in a letter or letters you’re interested in searching for.

As you can see in the screen below, I typed in avg to search for everything on my computer that contains those letters. The search starts immediately while you type and you can see the result in the pane below the search box. Even if I would back space over the g of avg and search on av, the search results would show that immediately. Nice. In another post I’ll show the advance search feature.

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Every Explorer window allows you to search files just by typing in the search box in the upper right-hand corner of Explorer.

The Menu Bar

What happened to the Menu Bar? Or what used to be called the menu toolbar. You know the one that has – File | Edit | View | Tools | Help. Well the Organize button on the Command Bar allows you to turn the Menu Bar on and off. You click on Organize -> Layout and then Menu Bar. Presto!! There they are, the standard menus selections we’re used to seeing. For some reason it is set to NOT display as the default setting. See image below.

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Folder and File Management is important as it is the key to organizing all your data that will come and go, get backed up and restored, and searched for.

Look for future blog posts here for further explanations and explorations of Windows Vista Explorer.