Where’s My Stuff? Finding and Organizing Files

Windows Vista includes an updated version of the Explorer file system that appeared in Windows XP. Like its predecessor, Windows Vista supports the notion of special shell folders where you can access such much-needed data files as documents, digital photos, digital music, and videos. However, Vista adds a number of new Explorer constructs, such as virtual folders called Search Folders, which are confusing but powerful when used correctly. In this article, you will explore the Windows shell and learn how to take advantage of the new features Microsoft added to Windows Vista.

Understanding Special Shell Folders

Most article readers are probably familiar with basic computer file system concepts like files, folders, and drive letters. But you may not realize that certain locations in the Windows shell - that is, Windows Explorer, the application with which you literally explore the contents of your PC’s hard drives - have been specially configured to work with particular data types. In Windows XP and previous Windows versions, these locations were called special shell folders, and they included such locations as My Documents, My Pictures, and My Music. In Windows Vista, these special shell folders still exist, but now most of them have different names and are accompanied by a number of new members. Each of the special shell folders in Windows Vista shares certain characteristics. First, they are all physical folders in the sense that they are represented by a specific location in the Windows shell hierarchy. For example, your Home folder is now found at C:\Users\username by default. Likewise, Documents can be found at C:\Users\username\Documents. In Windows XP, you had to run Windows Movie Maker once before the My Videos folder would appear. This is no longer the case in Windows Vista, where the new Videos folder is always available under each user’s Home folder. Also, you might notice that the name of most of the folders (Saved Games is a curious exception) - and indeed the names of the folders above each of them in the shell path - has been stripped of spaces. That is, each folder is now a single word (Documents instead of My Documents).

That’s because of a renewed commitment to shell scripting in Windows Vista, an environment in which it’s simply harder to deal with spaces. ( 22 for more information about Vista’s scripting capabilities.) Finally, many of the special shell folders is represented somewhat differently in the Windows shell than are other folders, which you might think of as normal physical folders. The Documents, Favorites, Music, and Pictures folders are all colored blue-green now instead of the normal yellow folder color. And although you can create a folder almost anywhere you’d like in the Windows Vista shell - assuming you have the security credentials to do so - special shell folders are typically only found in their preset locations within the file system. Using tools such as TweakUI, it’s possible to change the location of special shell folders. So, for example, you might redirect Videos to a separate hard disk to which you’ve dedicated space specifically for video content. For more information about TweakUI, see the Windows Secrets Web site (www.windowssecrets.com).

Advanced users can also use Regedit to change special shell folder locations. With Regedit, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders. You’ll see a variety of special shell folders listed there, including Personal (Documents), My Music (Music), My Pictures (Pictures), and My Video (Videos). To change the location of one of these special folders, simply double-click in Regedit and add the new location to the Value data field in the dialog that appears. You can see some of Vista’s special folders in your Start Menu, but if you’d like a better idea of how they’re laid out in the file system, simply launch Windows Explorer, and enable the classic left-mounted folder hierarchy, which is now found in the bottom-left corner of the window. In addition to the new special shell folders in Vista, there are also some differences in the way that preexisting special shell folders are organized now. For example, folders such as My Pictures, My Music, and My Videos were physically arranged below (and logically contained within) the My Documents folder in previous Windows versions. But in Windows Vista, the new versions of these folders are found directly below each user’s Home folder, alongside Documents. This won’t impact typical users, who will likely access special shell folders like My Documents and My Pictures only from the Start Menu, but more advanced users will want to be aware of the changes. The new Home folder layout is actually quite similar to that used by Unix versions, including Apple’s Mac OS X. Vista even follows the same naming conventions these competitors utilize.

Visualization and Organization: How the Windows Vista Shell Works

In each Windows version, there are a number of shell view styles you can utilize, each of which presents the files and folders you’re looking at in slightly different way. These view styles - and the ways in which you access and configure them - have changed dramatically in Windows Vista. By comparison, Windows XP offered six Explorer view styles - Thumbnails, Tiles, Icons, List, Details, and, for folders containing digital pictures, Filmstrip. There were also ways you could arrange the files folders, such as by name, type, or total size, or in groups, where icons representing similar objects would be visually grouped together. All of these options could be configured in a number of ways, including via buttons in the Explorer window toolbar, by right-clicking inside of an Explorer window, or from the View menu. Maddeningly, Windows XP would often forget its view styles, either on a per-window or systemwide basis. This is one of the few areas in which Windows XP was inferior to its predecessors. In Windows Vista, you’ll have to relearn many of your shell skills because the user interface has changed so much. Microsoft has not only changed the layout of the Explorer window user interface elements and menu items from which you configure view styles, but many of the view styles and arrangement options themselves have changed. You can access these styles in manners that are similar to those in Windows XP, via the Views button in an Explorer window toolbar, via the View submenu on the menu that appears when you right-click a blank area of the current Explorer window, or if you have the Classic Menus option enabled, via the View Menu. Unlike previous Windows versions, Windows Vista - finally - enables you to choose different icon view styles for the Desktop as well as for normal Explorer shell windows. To access these view modes, right-click a blank area of your Desktop and choose View. You’ll see three view styles here: Large Icons, Medium Icons, and Classic Icons. (Details, Extra Large Icons, Small Icons, and Tiles are not available on the Desktop.) What’s interesting is that these shell view styles are not your only view style options. You can also access intermediary view styles between each of those stock settings using a new slider control that pops down when you click the small arrow on the right side of the Views toolbar button, 5-2. This control enables you to fine-tune the look and feel of individual Explorer windows, so you can arrive at a view style that matches your preferences and system capabilities. For example, on a large widescreen display, you might prefer larger icons, whereas a smaller notearticle display might look better to your eyes in Details view. It’s up to you.You can also move the slider with the scroll wheel on your mouse if it’s so equipped. Simply open the slide control by clicking the arrow as noted previously and then use the scroll wheel to find the view style you like.

Sorting the Vista View Styles So what else has changed? Well, you may recall that the Windows XP Details view provided columns by which you could sort the contents of the current window. In Windows Vista, every view style can be sorted by these columns, even if you can’t see them. To see this in action, open a Windows Explorer window and repeatedly click the Views button. Each time you do so, the icon view style changes. But what remains is the list of column headings that you typically associate with Details View. The column headings you see will vary from window to window, depending on the content. In the Document window, you’ll see column headings for Name, Data Modified, Type, Size, and Tags. But the Pictures folder has column headings for Name, Date taken, Tags, Size, and Rating. These column headings aren’t just for show. As with previous Windows versions (in which the column headings were available only in Details view), you can click any column heading in order to sort the currently viewed content by that criteria. For example, if you click the Name column heading, the folders and files in the current folder will be sorted alphabetically by name, from A to Z. If you click the Name column heading a second time, the sorting is reversed, and the folders and files are listed from Z to A. Each column heading works in a similar fashion. What’s changed is that the column headings now have a drop-down list box associated with each of them. These list boxes provide you with a wealth of sorting options. To trigger the list box, you’ll first need to find it. Mouse over a column heading (like Name) and you’ll see an arrow appear on the right side of the column heading. If you click this arrow, the drop-down list box appears. The various gadgets and doohickeys you see in the list box might be initially confusing, so take a closer look. At the top of the list box you will see two or three of the following options, depending on which column heading you choose:

Sort: Works just like clicking the column heading normally does; it sorts the folders and files in the current window accordingly. However, it does provide a bit of a visual cue, which can be handy: If the little arrow to the left of Sort is pointing down, 5-3, then clicking the Sort option will result in a reverse sort (for example, Z to A in the case of the Name column heading). If the arrow is clicking up, the items will be sorted normally (A to Z for Name).

Stack: This option does not appear with the Name column heading. It is brand new to Windows Vista and is the result of years of user interface testing. According to Microsoft, as hard drives get bigger and bigger, and users store more and more data on those drives, it’s getting harder and harder to find the information you need. Stacks are one way to present lots of information in a simpler fashion. Like most computer user interface metaphors, Stack comes from a traditional desktop, where you might stack related papers together, creating a literal stack of content. In the real world, you might stack documents for a specific trip, project, or other relationship together. And now you can do so in Windows Vista as well. However, because Stacks don’t actually appear in the current folder, but instead open a search results window, we’ll examine this functionality more closely later in this article when we look at Vista’s search features.

Group: Enables you to group folders and files into related groups, as you would when using the Windows XP Tiles view. But now you can group files and folders regardless of the view style. You can group by name, date modified, keywords, author, type, and other criteria, and your grouping options will depend on the contents of the folder you’re currently viewing. In a typical folder full of documents, the default is Date Modified. But you can choose other grouping types by rightclicking the current folder and choosing Group By and then the criteria you want. The Group option is most famous for its use in the default view of My Computer in Windows XP, which grouped tiled icons by Type. Interestingly, this is exactly the same in Windows Vista, as well, so open up My Computer now to see how a grouped view can look. You can see an example in article 5-4. (Note, however, that the types of items displayed in the Windows Vista version of My Computer are a bit different.) Below the Search box, what you will see will depend on the column heading you’ve clicked. For example, the Date Modified column heading includes a mini calendar control that lets you specify a date or even a date range from which to filter the current folder. Like the search functionality mentioned previously, the results of this filter are displayed in a new view that actually contains search results, so we’ll save this for later discussion as well. Finally, at the bottom of the drop-down list box, you will see a number of preset Stack settings, which naturally vary according to which column heading you’ve chosen. The Name column heading, for example, includes preset Stacks such as 0–9, A–M, and N–Z (the actual letter ranges you see will be based on the names of the files and folders you’re viewing). What’s interesting about these preset Stacks is that they’re, ahem, stackable. That is, you can check any number of these preset Stacks to filter the view (which, yes, returns a search result). So you can filter the view to contain files and folders that begin (or end) with both numbers from 0–9, say, and the letters A–M. Other column headings offer different preset Stacks. You might see Last week and Today under the Date Modified heading, for example, or Jan and unspecified under Author. As is often the case in Windows Vista, of course, the choices will be based on your particular system. That is, you won’t see a Jan choice unless one of the documents in the current folder was actually authored by someone named Jan.

Where Is It Now? One of the challenges facing anyone moving to Windows Vista is that Microsoft chose to change the location of many user interface elements, which might make it hard for you to navigate around the shell in some instances. In Table 5-3, we summarize some of the changes you can expect to see, and how to work around them.

Search Folders, Saved Searches, and Virtual Folders Early in the several-year development lifecycle of Windows Vista, Microsoft began talking up a new file management system that’s based on a new user interface construct called a virtual folder. As the name suggests, virtual folders are a special kind of folder, one that does not actually represent a physical location in the file system. You may recall that the constructs we call folders and special shell folders do, in fact, correspond to discrete locations in the shell namespace. That is, they are what we might call real folders. Virtual folders are not the same as real folders. That is, they do not actually contain files and other folders. Instead, virtual folders contain symbolic links, or shortcuts, to real files and folders. And the way virtual folders are created might surprise you: They’re really just the physical embodiment of a file search. That’s right: Virtual folders contain search query results. For this reason, Microsoft has elected to name virtual folders as Search Folders. And Search Folders, naturally, contain saved searches.