Windows Vista has a new and improved explorer interface with much more powerful usability. Firstly you will notice that the backwards and forwards buttons are still present in the same location but are now right next to eachother for quick access. The move up a folder button has been removed as well as the search button and folders button and the view button has been removed from its location on XP as well.
The new Windows Explorer still has these features, however the locations have been changed a bit in favor of a breadcrumb navigation section, meaning that as you go deeper into folders you can see the different folders you have gone through to get to the last one but are able to instantly click one, whether the folder was the first, middle or last one that you browsed through to get back to it. You are also able to click on arrow buttons after the folder names to enable you to quickly choose other folders underneath those previous folders. The search button has been removed but is present as a search bar and is fully functional with fast search indexing, where search as you type searches can be performed. The views button has been placed on a toolbar along with an Organize button that are available throughout Windows Explorer but with different options afterwards depending on what type of folder you are in; the Pictures folder has extra buttons that are different from the Music folder for example. The Views button in Vista has more granular control on what type of view you would like of your files/folders from Tiles to Extra Large Icons.
Windows Vista no longer has a tasks pane on the left but instead has a favorite links section where you can get back to commonly used folders and can add your own folder shortcuts in the Links folder. The menu bar has not been removed entirely from Windows Explorer but has been hidden by default and can be accessed by pressing ALT+F but can be also shown permanently.
You can have this bar displayed permanently by
1) click on Tools
2) scroll to Folder options
3) choose the View tab
4) check the box next to Always show menus
In Windows Explorer on Windows Vista you can now view items by various methods as well as stacking items, where you can stack the files or folders by Name, Tags, Size, and many more. You can also Group by Name, Size, Modified and many more options also. Below are some different example of stacking, viewing and grouping in the Pictures folder.
If you enter any folder in Windows Explorer you get a menu that has View, Sort by, Group by, Stack by, Refresh, and more. In the example above, we opened the pictures folder, the sample pictures folder to be exact and we chose Stack by Tags and then chose the option to View by Tiles. As you can see from the screenshot, you are able to see how many files have been placed under each tag. These are not folders, but are stacked files. They appear to work as folders however, in that you can enter each one individually and see the results corresponding to each tag, e.g. all pictures with the tag, Wildlife, are seen under the Wildlife stack. You can in fact have the same picture file in this case stacked under various tags depending on which tags you have chosen for your files. These results are controlled by the search facility in Windows Vista.
You can also choose to group by Name which shows different sections divided by the alphabet. These sections are variable; the more files you have in the folder which have varied names, the more sections will be automatically created. In the example above there are not that many files and most are in the section, A-H. If you have many files in the folder which you are viewing grouping options, you can view certain letters only by collapsing the other sections, To collapse other sections
Click the arrow pointing upwards to the right, ^
This will collpase the section directly below the arrow but can be viewed again easily by clicking the arrow again.
In Windows Vista, you can choose star ratings for you files, for example if you listen to alot of music, you can rate various tracks or albums so that you can find your best tracks only at a later date if you wanted to or all tracks that have been given 4 stars and above. These are 5 stars to choose from, where 5 is the highest rating. Star rating, Tags and other options such as this are new features that work on Metadata to add more information to files that before. This metadata allows for more granular searching through the search option in vista as well as stacking, grouping and viewing options. In the above example we have chosen to Group by ratings. This has been done in the same way as before, by right clicking on the blank space in the folder and choosing Group by.
The same functionality applies as the previous screenshot where we grouped by Name, in that you can collapse various sections as you see fit.
Choosing group by, can be done very easily in the same way as Stack by, Sort by and View by,
We discussed at the top of this page that the menu back (the bar which contains File, Edit, View, Tools, Help) is not shown on the Windows Explorer windows by default and a method to permanently show the menu bar, by going in to Tools, Folder options, View and chosing always show menu bar. This can be done in anoither way also as well as other layout options which we shall discuss here,
In you Windows Explorer window:
1) click the Organize button
2) click Layout
3) click Menu Bar
You will notice other options under menu bar also. These options allow you to toggle various parts of the Windows Explorer window on or off. As you can see from the screenshot below, the Details Pane and Navigation Pane have been highlighted in blue. This is because they are currently switched on and are usually switched on by default. You can switch these off by clicking on them. If you want to choose more than one option you will have to go back to that menu however many options you want to switch on or off. You will notice two other options that have not been switched on and may not be familiar with these items. They are the Search Pane and Preview Pane.
The Search Pane adds another toolsbar that has various options for only viewing certain items in the current window as well as including an advanced search feature that allows you to access advanced features from Windows Search from any folder in Windows Explorer, so you don't have to open up the search utility from the start menu.
The Preview Pane allows you to view pictures, music, video from within the explorer windows on the right hand side so you don't have to open up the file in order to check out what it is.
When you open up Computer through the control panel or by other means, you will notice that the Computer browser is in fact Windows Explorer. There are the same functions that you can use for the rest of the folders in Windows Vista including grouping, stacking and viewing options. You will notice though from the screenshot above that there is a button on the toolbar called System Properties as well as Uninstall or change program. System properties allows you to view the various system properties including how much ram, processor speed, etc. Uninstall or change a program allows you to uninstall applications as well as change windows programs. This can be done through Control Panel, however, with many more options.
There are new changes to the hard drive icons and viewing free space compared to XP, which are that now you can view free space graphically by a blue bar going from left to right. The more free space you have the smaller the bar. You can also see the amount of free space as well as the size of the entire hard drive by looking below the bar for each individual hard drive. There is also a new feature allowing you to quickly view which hard drive contains the \Windows directory - this is seen as the windows flag on top of the hard drive icon, in the example above you can see this on Local Disk (D:). When you doubleclick Local Disk (D:) you can view the Windows directory as well as Program Files and the Users directory.
When you copy or move files you will notice the Vista theme with a more information than XP. You can see the amount of items being copied, with the size of these items.
You can view more information also by clicking the arrow next to more information. This displays information such as where the files are being copied from as well as where the files are going to, also the average speed of the copy or move is displayed. If you are copying only a few files you may not have time to click the More information section as the window only appears when files are being copied, you would notice all the features if you are copying many items or larger items.