First, there’s a tab that’s not a tab: The colored File tab is really a button that displays the new File menu. Shown in Figure 4-22, this menu provides several useful options, including the ability to open a new window, ideal for side-by-side file copying, open a command prompt or PowerShell window, delete the history in your recent places and address bar history lists, and access help.
Figure 4-22: The new File Explorer File menu
You can jump quickly to the Home tab from another Explorer tab by tapping Alt + H.
Next, the Home tab includes the most commonly needed commands related to files and folders, and for the most part, this is the obvious place to start if you’re a heavy mouse user and like to click on icons to initiate actions, such as Move to, Copy to, and Rename.
Need to access Share quickly? Type Alt + S.
The Share tab contains commands related to sharing, of course, and for this reason it’s a location you most likely won’t be using very often.
The View tab can be displayed by typing Alt + V.
The View tab, conversely, contains a number of commands we wish were more easily accessible, including the various icon sizes—Extra Large Icons, Large Icons, Medium Icons, Small Icons, List, Tiles, Details, and Content—and the various grouping options. It’s perhaps not coincidental that File Explorer has a miniature set of buttons in the status bar in the lower-right corner of the window that lets you toggle between two of the most common icon sizes, Details and Large Icons.
If you enjoy creating your own libraries, Windows 8 does have a new feature where you can customize a library’s icon to any icon in the system, offering a much more personalized look.
Put simply, the File Explorer ribbon is something that new users should leave displayed until they’re comfortable with the new interface. But power users will likely want to keep it hidden and enjoy the simpler interface afforded by this configuration.
Hidden in the upper-left corner of the File Explorer window is a new Quick Access Toolbar, which can be customized with the commands you need most often. That’s ideal for power users who want to hide the ribbon but also want access to a handful of useful commands.
OK, it’s time to see what you can really do with this thing. While most of the behaviors you’ll see in File Explorer are the same as with previous Windows versions, there have been some key changes and improvements as well. In keeping with the focus of this book, we’ll assume that you understand the basics, and how things used to work, and highlight only these new features.
Working with Files
While we await a future in which the data we work with is managed for us automatically via some cloud-based mechanism, the reality of today is that we work with files regularly. These include documents related to work, such as Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and Excel spreadsheets, as well as photo files, music files, video files, and many others. Windows 8, like all previous versions, includes all the basic file operations one might expect—copy, move, rename, delete, and so on—and many of these have been improved nicely in this release.
Microsoft has significantly updated the file copy and move experience in Windows 8, making it both faster and easier to manage. If you’re familiar with how this works in Windows 7 and older Windows versions, you know that each file and/or move operation you begin creates its own file or move window, and that each subsequent operation slows everything down to an eventual crawl. The multi-window file copy/move experience in Windows 7 can be seen in Figure 4-23.
So how does one improve on a cluttered, slow experience? Simple: Make it streamlined and faster. And that’s exactly what’s happened in Windows 8. Now, file copies and moves all occur in a single window in which you can pause any copy or move processes if you’d like to give precedence to another operation. This can be seen in Figure 4-24
Figure 4-23: In older Windows versions, multiple file copies (and moves) resulted in slower performance and required multiple windows.
Figure 4-24: The new file copy/move experience in Windows 8
You can also click the More Details button to display a new detailed view of the file copy/move experience that shows the speed of the operation, how much data is left to transfer, and so on. This More Details view can be seen in Figure 4-25.
Figure 4-25: Detail view of the new file copy/move experience
Under the hood, things have improved dramatically, and file copies and moves occur much more quickly than before, even when you have multiple file operations going at once.
But what about when things go wrong? One of the most common things that can happen during a file copy or move operation is that one or more of the files involved in the operation already exists in the destination folder. So Windows has always offered up a dialog or window in these situations, asking the user what to do.
In Windows 7, Microsoft improved what it calls Explorer’s “confliction resolution” logic to pretty good effect. But in Windows 8, it’s done so again, offering its most obvious interface yet. This is actually quite important, because when you see the window shown in Figure 4-26 in Windows 7, it’s not always clear which option you should choose.
You can find out more about each of the files in the conflict windows by mousing over them. A small tooltip will appear, displaying its path. Want to view the file? Just double-click it. Yes, really.
Things are considerably clearer in Windows 8. Now, when a file conflict occurs, you see the window shown in Figure 4-27. The Replace or Skip Files window lets you choose which files have precedence globally or choose them on a file-by-file basis.
Figure 4-26: Windows 7 made it somewhat difficult to resolve file copy and move conflicts.
Figure 4-27: In Windows 8, file copy/move conflicts are more easily resolved.
While the act of renaming a file is simple enough and hasn’t changed markedly since Windows 7, there is one neat aspect to multi-file renaming that’s worth mentioning, since so few are aware of it. And that’s that Windows 8 supports a cool way of renaming multiple files in a folder.
To recap, you can rename an individual file by selecting it and pressing F2, by selecting it and then clicking it again with the mouse, or via touch by selecting it and then tapping it again. When a file is in rename mode, its name is highlighted as shown in Figure 4-28. If you start typing now, you will replace the current name with whatever you type.
Figure 4-28: When a file is in rename mode, its name appears highlighted.
This renaming trick works with folders, too, not just files.
Normally, you hit Enter when you’re done renaming a file. But if you want to move to the next file and rename that, tap Tab instead. This will put the next file in rename mode, allowing you to instantly rename it next. You can keep tapping Tab, instead of Enter, to rename subsequent files in the current folder.