Section 2.8. Immortalizing Your Tweaks: All Versions

2.8. Immortalizing Your Tweaks: All Versions

Once you've twiddled and tweaked an Explorer window into a perfectly efficient configuration of columns and views, you needn't go through the same exercises for each folder. Vista can immortalize your changes as the standard setting for all your windows .

Choose Organize Folder and Search Options View tab. Click the Apply to Folders button, and confirm your decision by clicking Yes.

POWER USERS' CLINIC
The Little Filtering Calendar

Some of Explorer's column-heading pop-up menusDate modified, Date created, Date taken, and so ondisplay a little calendar, right there in the menu. You're supposed to use it to specify a date or date range. You use it, for example, if you want to see only the photos taken last August, or the Word documents created last week. Here's how the little calendar works:

To change the month , click the or buttons to go one month at a time. Or click the month name to see a list of all 12 months; click the one you want.

To change the year , click the or buttons. Or, to jump farther back or forward, double-click the months name. You're offered a list of all ten years in this decade. Click a third time (on the decade heading) to see a list of decades . At this point, "drill down" to the year you want by clicking what you want. (The calendar goes from 1601 to the year 9999, which should pretty much cover your digital photo collection.)

To see only the photos taken on a certain date , click the appropriate date on the month-view calendar.

To add photos taken on other dates , click additional squares. You can also drag horizontally, vertically, or diagonally to select blocks of consecutive dates.

Unfortunately, there's no easy way to say, "Show me all the photos taken in June and July" or "...in 2004" using this calendar, although you can always create such queries using the Search program described in the next chapter.

The checkboxes below the calendar offer one-click access to photos taken earlier this week, earlier this year, and before the beginning of this year ("a long time ago").

At this point, all of your disk and folder windows open up with the same view, sorting method, and so on. You're still free to override those standard settings on a window-by-window basis, however. (And if you change your mind again, and you want to make all of your maverick folder windows snap back to the standard settings, repeat the process, but click Reset Folders instead.)