This month, let’s work on shortcuts. In previous months we worked a bit with executables (.exe files). You may want to review the previous two articles to recall file names. Remember that our web site has the last several months' newsletters in HTML format and also Acrobat Reader.

Have you set your Windows Explorer to show all files and their extensions? Remember that Open means Double-click and Select means one click. Open My Computer. Open Drive C. (Launches Windows Explorer). Select View, Options, View. Select Show all Files, De-select Hide files of these types, Select Display the full MS-DOS path in the title bar, and De-select Hide MS-DOS file extensions. And last, Select Ok. Let’s close this version of Explorer out and use the one on the Start menu. Select Start, Select programs, Select Windows Explorer.

Now back to Explorer. This Explorer has two panes, left and right, called the Tree Pane and the File Pane. Select View, then Details. Remember that an executable says Application under the heading Type in the right-hand pane. In the Tree view (the left pane), find C: and then find the folder Windows. If you select the folder icon, the icon changes from a closed folder to an open folder. If you select the "+" to the left of it, Explorer expands the directories one level below it. If you select the word Windows, the effect is the same as selecting the folder icon. Selecting the folder icon is preferred, because selecting the name is also the way to rename a folder and we certainly don’t want to do that!

In the right pane there are some things to observe. The columns are named Name, Size, Type, and Modified. If you select any of these column headers, you’ll see that they are made to sort by that category. The default is to sort by ascending Name. But if you click on Name and then again, you see that it’s now sorted by descending name. I often use this sorting to help me find items, usually to sort by descending date, so that a file I just changed will be at the top.

For this practice, we want to have some of the desktop visible, so look at the top right corner at the three symbols called Minimize, Full (or Restore) and Close. Full is a square box with the top edge heavier. Restore is a symbol depicting two overlaid boxes. If it’s currently Restore, then click it to change it to Full, then grab a corner and resize the window so that Explorer covers either the top or bottom half of the screen. Don’t be confused by their names, because they don’t describe the current state of the window. If the center symbol is Full, then clicking on it will make the window go to full screen, and the symbol changes to Restore, so that you can restore it to a smaller size. Confusing until you practice with it a bit.

We want to find a file Calc.exe for this exercise. An easy way is to sort by ascending name, and since we’re looking for an Application, it should be at the top near the folders. So select Type once and then scroll down to Applications, and find Calc.exe. Let’s make a shortcut for it first, then go on to placing it in the start menu.

Select the file Calc.exe by placing the mouse over the Calc icon and select it with the right mouse button, and drag it to an open place on the desktop. When you let go of the mouse button a small pop-up menu comes up with Move here, Copy here, Make Shortcut(s) here and Cancel. Just before you let go of the mouse, the grayed-out symbol you were dragging changed into a Shortcut symbol. The Shortcut symbol is a box with an up arrow in it bent in the middle to the right. It’s small, but this symbol tells you the default action is Make Shortcut(s) here, and indeed if you look at the pop-up menu when you let go, that same selection is bolded, meaning you could have used the left mouse instead and just dropped it and it would have created a shortcut on its own. All of these actions have a default, but the default changes according to what type of file it is and whether you’re dropping it onto the same or a different drive. This takes a little practice. Since you use this same technique to copy and move files you’ll need to mess with it for a while until you get some idea of what it will do.