DON'S FREEWARE CORNER - FEB 2016
FINDING AND RENAMING FILES WITH THE WINDOWS
EXPLORER PREVIEW PANEL
©2016 Donald R. Snow
This page was last updated 2016-02-19
These Freeware Corner notes are published in
TAGGology, our Utah Valley Technology and
Genealogy Group (UVTAGG) monthly newsletter,
and are posted on
http://uvtagg.org/classes/dons/dons-classes.html where
there may be corrections or updates.
WINDOWS EXPLORER
This free utility program has been in versions
of Windows, almost from the beginning.
The name WINDOWS EXPLORER makes it easily
confused with the program INTERNET EXPLORER,
which is a browser, i.e., a program that
allows you to get to the Internet. In
Windows 10 the browser's name has been changed
to EDGE, so it won't be confused with WINDOWS
EXPLORER. WINDOWS EXPLORER is a very
useful computer utility to work with files on
your computer, to list, run, move,
drag-and-drop, and rename them. In
this note I will describe some little-known
features of WINDOWS EXPLORER in Windows 7 that
help greatly in finding and renaming files.
OPENING WINDOWS EXPLORER
You can open WINDOWS EXPLORER by clicking on
the "file folder" icon at the bottom left of
your Windows 7 screen, next to the Start/Stop
globe. Clicking on this icon again
doesn't open another copy of WINDOWS EXPLORER,
but you can do this by making a shortcut icon
on your desktop. Do this by clicking on
the Start/Stop globe, typing in Explorer,
right-clicking on WINDOWS EXPLORER when you
see those words, and creating a shortcut on
your Desktop. This desktop icon will
allow you to open multiple copies of WINDOWS
EXPLORER, so you can drag and drop between
them. Many drag-and-drop operations are
easier with multiple copies. It's like
working with Q-DIR or FREE COMMANDER which
have two or more panels and allow moving files
from one panel to another.
HELP SCREENS
With WINDOWS EXPLORER open clicking on the
Question Mark icon (upper right corner) opens
the Help panel. This shows various
options to get more help, including how to
have a friend help you fix your computer
through the Internet. There is a search
box to use keywords to find answers about
WINDOWS EXPLORER and how to use it.
USING THE WINDOWS EXPLORER PREVIEW PANEL
A little-known option in WINDOWS EXPLORER is
to open the Preview Panel. This defaults
to being closed. The Preview Panel
allows you to see the document, pdf, jpg, or
whatever, without having to open the file in
another program. Thus, by arrowing down
the list of files in a folder you see the
first page of each and, if the document or pdf
or picture has more than one page, it even
allows you to use the scroll bar to see all
the other pages. This makes it so you
can tell what's in a document without having
to open it in another program. If you
don't use the Preview Panel when renaming
files you have to open the file in its
program, note the name and date you want to
use, close it in that program, and then rename
it in WINDOWS EXPLORER. With the Preview
Panel open you can see what's in the file
right there and rename the file immediately.
To open the Preview Panel click on the
rectangular icon in the upper right corner
next to the Help question mark
icon. This icon toggles the
Preview Panel on and off. To the left of
the Preview Panel icon is an icon to show the
file/folder list in various ways.
I usually leave it set to Show Details
so I can see the title, date, size, etc., of
the files. Note that only those programs
for which you have a default program assigned
will show in the Preview Panel. For
others the Preview Panel remains
blank. By dragging the vertical
demarcation line in the title bar across the
top you can widen or shrink the Preview Panel
so you can see the contents more easily.
When I scan documents to a flash drive at a
Family History Center, the scanner gives them
names like Scanned-image-12.pdf,
Scanned-image-13.pdf, etc. By moving
those files to a folder on my computer and
opening the folder in WINDOWS EXPLORER, I can
see what's in each file by just highlighting
the file name. Without this I have
to open the file in another program.
With the Preview Panel I don't have to try to
remember the name or date to rename the file
since I can see it there. And to find a
particular file in a folder, if I don't know
the name or haven't renamed it yet, I can open
the folder and arrow down the list and watch
the Preview Panel until I find the file I'm
looking for. This has saved me hours and
hours of time and I use it every time I scan
things at the FHC. The naming system for
files that I have worked out over several
years so they alphabetize in chronological
order is discussed in another set of notes,
but uses the date in International Date
Format, YYYY-MM-DD so they alphabetize in
chronological order.
CONCLUSIONS
This is an example of a feature that has been
in WINDOWS EXPLORER for some time, but that I
just discovered a couple of years ago.
Since discovering it, I have used it many
times. Maybe you already knew about it,
but I didn't. It makes me wonder how
many other features there are in programs that
I use, but don't know about them. Like
someone said, we only use about 10% of our
brains and I imagine we only use about 10% of
the features in our computer programs. I
hope this helps some of you in your Family
History work.
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