Setting Folder Options
Folder Options should be seen as more of a superset of controls over all folders on a system, whereas folder customization occurs on an individual or parent and subfolder basis. Folder Options is a Control Panel applet you can access from Computer and Windows Explorer. This applet is used to set a wide range of file system features.
Open the Folder Options dialog box by clicking the Organize button and then clicking Folder and Search Options. The Folder Options dialog box appears as shown in Figure 5.22. The General tab of the Folder Options dialog box defines whether folders are opened in the same or in a new window, and whether single-clicks or double-clicks are used to open items. You can also configure the Navigation pane to show all folders by default, and/or automatically expand to the current folder. If you make changes to this tab, you can always return to the default by clicking the Restore Defaults button.
Customizing File and Folder Views i69
Figure 5.22
The Folder Options dialog box.
The View tab (see Figure 5.23) perform two major functions—folder view management and advanced settings management. For folder view management, all folders can be reset to their default views, or the currently selected folder's view can be applied to all folders.
Figure 5.23
The View tab of the Folder Options dialog box.
The Advanced Settings section contains a long checklist of settings. One use of this section is to choose what you want the OS to show you and hide from you. For example, if you want to see every file on your system, enable Show Hidden Files, Folders, and Drives and disable Hide Extensions for Known File Types and Hide Protected Operating System Files (Recommended). To return to the defaults, just click the. The other tab in the Folder Options dialog box is the Search tab, which you learn more about in the section, "Searching," p.173.
Managing Libraries note
If you've tried to delete a folder that looked empty but an error message states that the folder still contains files, you are probably dealing with hidden files. To see what's not being shown, change the Hidden Files and Folders Advanced setting to Show Hidden Files, Folders, and Drives. You might run into this issue with downloaded applications that must be extracted to a temporary folder before being installed. They sometimes include files premarked as hidden.
In Windows 7, libraries provide a convenient mechanism for grouping related content items in ways that make sense to the user. The default libraries group items by type of content, so you'll find document files in Documents, music and related files in Music, photos and images in Pictures, and video and related files in Videos. But there's no reason why you can't create a library for a project that might contain all these file types, and more. Let's take a look at what's involved in creating a library, and adding and removing elements from that library.
Post a comment