File Maintenance Using the Open and Save As Dialog Boxes
One of the best-kept secrets of Windows 8 is
the fact that you can perform many of these file maintenance operations
within two of Windows 8’s standard dialog boxes:
• Open—In most applications, you display this dialog box by selecting the File, Open command, or by pressing Ctrl+O.
• Save As—You usually
display this dialog box by selecting File, Save As. Or, if you’re
working with a new, unsaved file, by selecting File, Save, or by
pressing Ctrl+S.
Here are three techniques you can use within these dialog boxes:
• To perform maintenance on a
particular file or folder, right-click the object to display a shortcut
menu like the one shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. You can perform most basic file and folder maintenance right from the Open and Save As dialog boxes.
• To create a new object, right-click an empty section of the file list, and then click New to get the New menu.
• To create a new folder within the current folder, click the New Folder button.
Metadata and the File Explorer Property System
We mentioned earlier that Windows is
gradually lessening the importance not only of drive letters, but also
specific file locations. As an example of the latter, note that file
libraries are really virtual folders that can consist of multiple
locations.
If file location will become less important,
what can you use to take its place as a basis for file organization?
Content seems like a pretty good place to start. After all, it’s what’s
inside the documents that really matters. For example, suppose you’re
working on the Penske account. It’s a pretty good bet that all the
Penske-related documents on your system actually have the word Penske
inside them somewhere. If you want to find a Penske document, a file
system that indexes document content sure helps because then you need
only do a content search on the word Penske.
However, what if a memo
or other document comes your way with an idea that would be perfect for
the Penske account, but that document doesn’t use the word Penske
anywhere? This is where purely content-based file management fails
because you have no way of relating this new document with your Penske
documents. Of course, you could edit the new document to add the word Penske
somewhere, but that’s a bit kludgy and, in any case, you might not have
write permission on the file. It would be far better if you could
somehow identify all of your documents that have “Penskeness”—that is,
that are directly or indirectly related to the Penske account.
This sounds like a job for metadata, and that’s fine because metadata is nothing new in the Windows world:
• Digital photo files often come with
their own metadata for things such as the camera model and image
dimensions, and some imaging software enables you to apply tags to
pictures.
• In Windows Media Player, you can
download album and track information that gets stored as various
metadata properties: Artist, Album Title, Track Title, and Genre, to
name just a few.
• The last few versions of Microsoft Office have supported metadata via the File, Properties command.
• For all file types, Windows displays
in each file’s property sheet a Summary tab that enables you to set
metadata properties such as Author, Comments, and Tags.
In Windows 8, metadata is an integral part of
the operating system. With the Windows Search engine, you can perform
searches on some or all of these properties . You can also use them to group and filter files.
To edit a document’s metadata, Windows 8 gives you two methods:
• In File Explorer, select View,
Details Pane. In the Details pane that now appears on the right side of
the window, click the property you want to edit. Windows 8 displays a
text box in which you can type or edit the property value. For example,
Figure 2 shows a photo’s Title property being edited. Click Save when you’re done.
Figure 2. You can edit a document’s configurable metadata directly in the Details pane.
• Right-click the document and click
Properties to display the property sheet, and then click the Details
tab. This tab displays a list of properties and their values. To edit a
property, click inside the Value column to the right of the property.
Note
By default, in most folder windows, Windows 8
displays the Tags and Type properties in Windows Explorer’s Details
view. (Specialized folders such as Music, Pictures, and Videos display
other properties in Details view.) To toggle a property’s column on and
off, right-click any column header and then click the property. Click
More to see a complete list of the available properties.
