Hello. Today we're going to be discussing the different views available in
"Computer," and how to change among the views, and how to sort in the different
views. Now the view that we're in right now is the small icon view. This view is
good if you have a lot of things in a given folder that you'd like to be able
to see all at once and if you have very good eyesight and good hand-eye coordination.
You might decide however you'd like to see things a little bit larger. If you
right-click on a blank part of the pane, you can choose "View"
and instead of choosing "Small icons," I might choose medium or large or even
extra large icons. In all of these views you see an icon representing the object
as well as the object's name. Once I get into the large icon view, I can actually
see a thumbnail of one of the pictures in here. There's another way you can
change among views, but you need to be able to see your menu bar to do that. You
might not see your menu bar, and if it's hidden you can display it by going to
Organize-->Layout, and click on "Menu Bar." From here, you have a menu option and you
have the same views available here that you had by right-clicking. You can go
through each of the views yourself and see what's available. The one other view
that I'd really like to point out, however, is the "Details" view. I really
like this view because it gives you not just the information you had before in
those small and the large icons views, but it gives you some additional
information as well: When was the file last modified, what type of file it is,
what's its size, and if you right-click on the field headings row, you could
choose to add even additional fields to display. By default your files are
probably going to be organized alphabetically a-z: first A through to Z
in the folders, and A to Z in the file names. If you wish to change the order
when you're in the "Details" view, it's really easy. Maybe I'd like to group all
of my bitmap images together. I'd like to create a folder
and put all my bitmap images in. Well, I can just click on the field heading for
"Type" and if I click on it once, everything will be sorted in ascending
order by type -- folders first then files. If I click on a type field heading again it
reverses the sort order so it's sorting in descending order. I'm going to go back
to having things sorted alphabetically by name. This method of sorting is only
available in the "Details" view. If I switch to one of the other views -- maybe
the medium icons view -- I can still sort, but to do so, I would right-click on a
blank part of the pan' and then choose "Sort by," and select the field I'd like to
sort by -- again maybe "Date modified" -- maybe I'd like to have all the things that
were modified fairly recently close together so I can see that I remember that I
wanted to work with a Word document that I worked with just last week but I don't
remember what the name of the document was. By sorting according to
"Last modified," I'd be able to see fairly quickly which document was modified in
the past week. The sort order and the view that you use do not change the
contents of the folder; neither one changes the contents of the folder. You
may use any sort order and any view that you find useful. Sometimes you might want to
change back and forth between the views; that is entirely your choice. One of the
advantage of modern operating systems is that you do have the
customization. So go and choose whatever you'd like to do