Expert Drag-and-Drop Techniques
You’ll use the drag-and-drop technique
throughout your Windows career. To make drag-and-drop even easier and
more powerful, here are a few pointers to bear in mind:
• “Lassoing” multiple files—If
the objects you want to select are displayed in a block within the
folder list, you can select them by dragging a box around the objects.
This is known as lassoing the objects.
• Drag-and-scroll—Most
drag-and-drop operations involve dragging an object from the contents
area and dropping it on a folder in the Folders list (be sure to
display the Folders list first). If you can’t see the destination in
the Navigation pane, drag the pointer to the bottom of the pane.
Windows Explorer will scroll the pane up. To scroll the pane down, drag
the object to the top of the pane.
• Drag-and-open—If the
destination is a subfolder within an unopened folder branch, drag the
object and hover the pointer over the unopened folder. After a second
or two, File Explorer opens the folder branch.
• Inter-window dragging—You can drag an object outside of the window and then drop it on a different location, such as the desktop.
• Drag between Explorers—Windows
8 lets you open two or more copies of File Explorer (select File, Open
New Window). If you have to use several drag-and-drop operations to get
some objects to a particular destination, open a second copy of File
Explorer and display the destination in this new window. You can then
drag from the first window and drop into the second window.
• Canceling drag-and-drop—To
cancel a drag-and-drop operation, either press Esc or click the right
mouse button. If you’re right-dragging, click the left mouse button to
cancel.
Taking Advantage of the Send To Command
For certain destinations, Windows 8 offers an
easier method for copying or moving files or folders: the Send To
command. To use this command, select the objects you want to work with,
right-click the selection, and then click Send To in the shortcut menu.
You see a submenu of potential destinations, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. The Send To command offers a menu of possible destinations.
Note that the items in this menu (except the
disk drives) are taken from the following folder that contains shortcut
files for each item:
%UserProfile%\appdata\roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo
This means that you can customize the Send To menu by adding, renaming, and deleting the shortcut files in your SendTo folder.
Click the destination you want, and Windows 8 sends the object there. What do we mean by send? We suppose that drop
would be a better word because the Send To command acts like the drop
part of drag-and-drop. Therefore, Send To follows the same rules as
drag-and-drop:
• If the Send To destination is on a different disk drive, the object is copied.
• If the Send To destination is on the same disk drive, the object is moved.
Note
The user profile folder for a user is the following:
%SystemDrive%\Users\User
Here, %SystemDrive% is the drive on which Windows 8 is installed (such as C:), and User is the person’s username. Windows 8 stores the user profile folder for the current user in the %UserProfile% environment variable.
