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The View Menu

publication date: Jul 4, 2006
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author/source: Terry Robson
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File management is easy.  Believe me.  I have taught it to hundreds of mature students who all agreed that it was easier than they thought it would be.

Consider how we kept photographs in the olden days.  A large card board box to put them with shoe boxes inside for each year and envelopes in the shoe boxes for each roll of film.

Management of files is no more complex than that.

Microsoft Windows puts files into My Documents by default so that’s where we will start. 

If the large cardboard box is My Documents most of us just open the lid and chuck our documents in.  Eventually it will be hard to find things and we will have to create some sort of system to suit ourselves.

Before we reorganize the files lets have a look at the View menu.  This is one of the most useful menus and yet it is the most under used.  The diagram below shows the tiles view.  Large icons are easy to select and move. File titles and details are beside each icon.










With the Icons view the icons are smaller and the details are removed.  They are still easy to handle.












 

 

 

 

 

If you have so many files that they don’t fit the window you can use the List view.  This gives even smaller icons in a list format and means that you will be able to see all your files.














The Details view is the most useful.

By clicking on the column headings you can change the order.  You can arrange them alphabetically, by date modified, by type and by size.  The order you set in the Details viewis the order you get in all the other views

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Get into the habit of using the View menu whatever software you are using.  Its main purpose is to make life easier.

In the next article I show you how to organise your files for easy access.  In other words File Management.
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