Features of Vista Explorer (2)

Reading panel

In order to make it more efficient to view files using Explorer, Vista uses three panels for our operations, namely the Browse panel (navigation Pane), the reading panel (Reading Pane), and the preview panel (Preview Pane).

The browse panel is located on the left side of the Explorer window, showing some common locations in a tree format, or a virtual folder related to the selected content. For example, if we select a folder where the graphics files are saved, the Browse panel displays the actual folders such as My Pictures, my videos, and the virtual folders related to the level, date, keywords, etc. and digital photos.

The reading Panel is located on the right side of the Explorer window, and in simple terms, the reading Panel can display the contents of the currently selected file or folder. For example, if we select a picture, the thumbnail of the picture is displayed in the panel, and the details of the file are displayed in the Reading panel if we select a text file (Figure 4).

The preview panel is located below the Explorer window, where you can display information such as the size of the currently selected file or folder, date created, type, keyword, and so on.

These three panels can be selected according to the actual need to hide or display, not only that, their size can be arbitrarily adjusted, very convenient.

File filter

The next file filter can be said to be the most amazing feature in Vista. You can imagine a situation where a person who is not good at organizing, has a folder that holds hundreds of files of various types, digital photos, Word documents, MP3, and so on. It's a bit of a hassle to find what you need in so many files. Although in the old version of Windows we could have the resource manager sort the files by file type, size, modify information, and so on, but they are not comprehensive enough and cannot be interleaved. The file filter in Vista solves the problem well.

Let's say we need to find all the digital photos that were taken before a certain date and not more than 5MB in a folder that contains a variety of files, so you can do this:

This operation needs to be done in the advances filter Pane (Advanced Filter panel), so if the panel is not displayed in your window, you first need to click Configure this Explorer's layout (Configure the layout of the window) button, Open the Advanced Filter panel. Then we need to have the Resource Manager filter out all the files that are not in graphics format, so when you choose Pictures (graphics file) in the show results for (display results) menu, the Explorer displays only the graphics file (Figure 5).

Second, we have to meet the other two conditions, that is, before a date, and the volume can not exceed 5MB. There are two ways of doing this: adding filters manually

First click the Plus button on the left of the show results for menu to add a condition. Click the arrow next to the button to see a drop-down menu, select "Add Filter" here, then click the "Name" column in the filter condition that appears, and select "Date Taken" (Figure 6) in the Drop-down menu that appears later.

At this point the option on the right side of the condition will change depending on the attributes you choose. For example, we chose this property for the date of the shot, and then the condition that needs to be specified becomes the logical relationship of "is (equal to)", "is not (non)", "is before", or "are after (late)", and time related. Because we want to display all the photos taken before a certain date, select "is before" here and specify the date (Figure 7).

Of course, we also need to set a filter that filters all sizes larger than 5MB files in the same way. This allows all eligible files to be filtered out.