- [Instructor] As you start to do more in File Explorer,
you may want to configure the interface
to change how things look.
So I need to go to a folder with lots of files.
So I'll go to my documents folder
then to the client projects.
And so far we've been looking at folders
that just contain other folders.
But if I open this one called No Obstacles,
we see that folder contains lots of individual files,
pictures, documents, lots of different stuff.
Of course, I'm using the exercise files
that came with this course,
but you can use your own files if you prefer.
Now at the top of the file explorer window,
we see a bunch of controls and a few of these are menus.
There's the Sort menu, the View menu,
and a general menu you can get to
by clicking the button with three dots.
I want to start in the View menu.
The view establishes how files and folders are displayed.
And so far I've been using the details view.
With the details view enabled,
our files are listed with their file names,
as well as a bunch of other information,
like what type of file they are
and how much space they take up on the storage drive.
Let's see what it looks like
if we switch to a different view.
So go to that menu and let's switch to large icons.
Now at first, this looks pretty different,
but if we look at the path bar,
we can confirm that we are in the same folder.
We're looking at the same files,
but the way they are displayed is just different.
Large icons are nice
because I get a preview of many of the files
but on the other hand, I see less information about them.
Now, of course,
there are a bunch of other view options available.
So you might want to flip through here
until you find one that you like,
but I'm just going to reset to the details view.
And next, I want to go over to the sort menu.
These options can be useful
when you're trying to find something
in a long list of files.
Now, right now, my files are sorted alphabetically
by the file name,
but we could choose a different criteria here.
And if you go to this more sub menu,
there are even more options.
So maybe I want them sorted by the file type.
So when I choose that
now all of the Excel files are together,
all of the Word documents are together and so on.
Let's try another criteria:
In the sort menu, I'll go to the More sub menu again,
and I'll choose to sort by size.
So now the largest file is at the top
and they sort down from there.
Let's reset that back to sorting by the name
and next, I want to go back to the sorting menu
and I want to leave them sorted alphabetically by name,
but I want to take a look at the grouping options.
So if we point at this group by sub menu,
I can choose one of these criteria.
So I want to group my files by file type.
So now I have separate groupings
for the different types of files
and they are sorted alphabetically within those groups.
And if I go back to the view menu
and choose a different view, let's go back to large icons.
You can see it still has those groupings.
And you can always go back to the sort menu
and turn those groupings off.
Just go to the Group by sub menu and choose None.
Let's go back to the View menu
and this time, I want to go to this Show sub menu.
Here, we can choose to show
or hide some of the interface elements
in the file explorer window.
Now this mark tells me that this element is visible.
So I know that navigation pane is turned on
and the navigation pane
is actually this panel over here on the left.
So if I go back here and just click on it,
that will turn it off.
This makes the window cleaner,
but I kind of depend on the shortcuts
in that navigation pane.
So I want to turn it back on.
So back in the View menu, back in Show,
I can see it's off because the check mark is gone.
And if I click on it now, it'll come back.
Let's look at another one.
Back in the View menu back in Show,
I want to turn on the details pane,
which opens up over on the right side.
With that open, I can select a file
and it gives me a bunch of really useful information
about that file.
Let me reset the view back to the details view,
and that's going to make it easier
to see one more important option here.
Once again, in the View menu back under Show,
I want to turn on the file name extensions.
Every file ends with a period
followed by three or four letters.
This is the extension
and it tells you what type of file it is.
A file with the JPG extension is a picture file.
The docx extension is a Microsoft Word document,
and you'll learn different extensions over time,
but those extensions are not always visible on all files,
unless you turn on that option to show file extensions.
So if you need to see the extensions, just turn that on.
There are a lot of options here.
So you might want to take a little time and get this set up
with the view options that make sense to you.