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DADDY BOB'S COMPUTER Q & A
September 20, 2009
Q.
Why do some folders open with Icons while
others open with a list or something else?
How can the way they are displayed be
changed?
A.
How the contents of folders display is
called View Styles. Windows XP offers six
styles; Thumbnails, Tiles, Icons, Details
and for folders containing pictures,
Filmstrips. Also, you can arrange the files
in a folder in various ways like by name, by
type, by size or in groups.
All of
these settings are configured by using
buttons in the Explorer toolbar, by right
clicking inside a Explorer window, or from
the View Menu. On the left is from View Menu
on XP and the one on the right is from the
View Menu on Vista.
As can be
seen, Windows Vista increases the number of
ways files can be displayed from six to
seven but for some reason dropped or changed
some of those allowed in XP. In Vista you
have to choose between viewing the files as
Extra Large Icons, Large Icons, Medium
Icons, Small Icons, List, Details and Tiles.
Unfortunately, in both XP and Vista, Windows
sometimes forgets and may change the folder
styles that you have set both on a per
window or system wide basis. This was not
the case with Windows 95 or 98, but for
reasons known only to Microsoft, it does
occur in XP and Vista.
Thankfully, this aggravating situation has
been rectified in Windows 7 which no longer
forgets how you have set a folder view.
Windows 7 also has eight possible view
settings: Extra Large Icons, Large Icons,
Medium Icons, Small Icons, List, Details,
Tiles, and Content. But all that will be for
a future column after Windows 7 is released.
(October 22, 2009). I have thoroughly tested
and used every Microsoft operating system
since the early days of DOS, and find
Windows 7 to be their best effort since DOS
5.
As can be
seen from the pictures above, my preferred
Explorer view setting is Details. This
allows displaying the full name of the file,
and it displays them alphabetically making a
particular file much easier to locate. It
also allows, depending on the file type, the
choice of nearly 300 different parameters
that can be displayed. Things like
Size, Type, Author, Date Created, Date
Modified, etc. For folders with pictures,
all the details can be displayed like Date
Taken, Dimensions, Resolution, and all the
camera settings.
There are
many, many other modifications possible to
configure how the Explorer view is
displayed. Unfortunately most users just
continue to use the Windows defaults which
are by consensus of many experienced users
just plain boring and uninformative.
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