Sort files and folders.  How to organize files and folders on a computer How to make folder order not alphabetical

Sort files and folders. How to organize files and folders on a computer How to make folder order not alphabetical

Many people do not like the messy arrangement of elements. So let's take a moment, how to organize files in a folder in windows 7, namely sorting and grouping.

If there are not many elements, you can still figure it out, but it happens that there are a very large number of files with different extensions or folders. Such an extensive list will be difficult to perceive. Of course, when everything is laid out on the shelves, it is much more convenient. For this, OS developers came up with special ordering filter settings.

Basic filtering of files and folders: sorting and grouping

You can order your lists with options:

-sorting - using this setting, you can quickly organize files by size, type (documents, program shortcuts, images, etc.) and much more. To use this option, right-click on any empty space in the explorer. In the context menu, point to the “sort” item and select the option you want.

You can also use other sorting filters. To do this, select the “more” item in the context menu. You will see a window "Select columns in the table". Check the boxes to select which options you want to add. Press the "up", "down" buttons to determine their location in the context menu.

Do not forget about the items "Ascending" and "Descending". If we choose the first option, then it will sort from 0-9, from A-Z, if the second one, then from Z-A, from 9-0.

When combining the type of sorting, you can get an excellent organizing files in a folder in Windows 7. For example, the filter will sort groups of files by type, and at the same time in ascending order.

- grouping– with this setting, you can create groups of files and folders by size, name, type. This means that you can separate the elements you need from others.

To use this feature, click on an empty space in Windows Explorer 7 with the right button. From the menu that appears, select “Grouping” and set any grouping item.

Note: The methods described above only apply to the current folder. All new added Extra options ordering will be displayed in both "Sort" and "Grouping".

To get rid of grouping elements, click on "(None)", then all changes will disappear.

The sorting and grouping options can be used at the same time. For example, you can group by size or type, and sort a given group by date, name, or other properties.

If you left-click on the name of the group, then the elements.

Advanced filtering for organizing files and folders Windows 7: sorting and grouping

For the following filtering options, it is mandatory to use the tile view. The advanced options can be seen as an extension of grouping by filtering. You can even use this for filtering based on very specific criteria.

In tile view you have multiple columns such as name, data, size, and so on. If you hover over a column, you will notice a small arrow on the right side. Click on it and you'll see several options that let you sort into specific groups (for example, files named A through K).

Select an option and you will see how only files, folders according to the specified criterion will remain. In addition, you will see a small checkbox on the right side of the column, indicating that the filter is active.

You can select from multiple columns based on different criteria. In addition, it is possible to use the search box to filter even more precise results. To disable advanced grouping, simply uncheck the option.

As you can see, the explorer window can be quite powerful. organize files in folder in windows 7. After a bit of experimentation, you will get used to all the available options and quickly find the items you are looking for.

Even if your files are rationally systematized, you probably can’t find every document with ease, and you even forgot about the existence of some. The search system is indispensable if you know what to look for (as I said in my article ""). But when searching for forgotten files, it is of little use.

Fortunately, you can use another Explorer feature to do this - Arrange By. It provides a non-standard view of the data stored on your hard drive and helps you find long-forgotten documents or unnecessary files that just waste precious space. In this article, I will show you how to sort files using the "Organize" feature.

How does the Organize feature work?

As the name suggests, the Organize feature allows you to organize your files in a variety of ways depending on the option you choose. This feature is available in the Library panel in all libraries - Documents, Music, Pictures, and Videos. To see this panel, you need to go directly to the library. If you go to the library from the C:\Users folder (C:\Users), the panel will not be in it.

The Organize feature offers various options for grouping files according to the type of content stored in the library. However, different ordering methods work differently depending on the library.

It is also worth considering that different grouping methods use different presentation options for ease of perception. Some switch the current view to "Large Icons", others use the "Table" (Details) view. However, the representation can be independently changed to any other. To undo the grouping and restore the original view, you can use the Clear Changes option in the Arrange menu.

Documents Library

Let's take a look at how the Organize feature works in the Documents library. To see the available grouping methods (Figure A), click on the arrow in the Arrange menu. Each of the listed options arranges all the files in the library according to one principle or another, while the folders in which the files are stored are not displayed.

Figure A The Organize menu is available in the Library panel for each of the major libraries.

As you can see, the Folders option is selected by default - this is standard way file ordering. Other options present files in a whole new light - let's see which one.

The Author option groups files into stacks based on the author (Figure B). As you can see, there are 2305 documents of my authorship in the Greg Shultz stack. By double clicking on this stack, a list of files created by me opens, in the properties of which the author is indicated. In my case, these are Microsoft Office files - Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, Access databases, and PowerPoint presentations.


Figure B Organize by author groups documents into stacks according to the author name specified in the file properties.

In this way, I can find documents created by my friends and colleagues or files from authors completely unfamiliar to me, sent via e-mail or downloaded from the Internet. This feature can be very useful for several reasons.

In addition, I found and deleted 80 megabytes of completely unnecessary documents from the BED Web Team, Valued Acer Customer and Gainsville College, which I once downloaded from the Internet. They only took up space on the hard drive in vain, and even archived regularly, taking extra time and needlessly increasing the backup volume.

I even managed to find a whole mountain of photos that I received from my father via Windows Messenger. They were tagged with his name and stored in the My Received Files folder. I've been meaning to move them to my Pictures folder for a long time, and even thought I'd accidentally deleted them. Now I finally saved these photos in the right folder and I can admire them to my heart's content.

"Date of change"

The Date Modified option groups files into groups by modification date: Today, Yesterday, Last Week, and A Long Time Ago . There were so many files on my computer that I had to select the "Table" view and use the "Collapse All Groups" option in the "View" menu in order to somehow manage the list (Fig. .C).


Figure C The Date Modified option organizes files into groups based on the date they were modified.

As you can see, the "Long ago" group contains a huge number of files. I double-clicked on the group to view them and remove the unwanted ones, then clicked on the Date Modified column to sort in ascending order and found a bunch of files from 1995, which I set to studying.

"tag"

The Tag option groups files by keywords. For ease of reference, I chose the List view (Figure D), was amazed at how many documents I had with keywords, and realized how effective using tags to identify files can be.


Figure D The Tag option groups files by keywords.

"A type"

The Type option groups files by type. Because different file types have different icons, I chose the Medium Icons view (Figure E) for ease of reference. Expanding the “Bitmap” stack, I was surprised to find a lot of images in the BMP format, which, as you know, is quite large. The list of files in the stack is displayed in the "Table" mode, so I sorted the images in descending order of size and found a BMP file of just over 5 megabytes, and there were almost 500 megabytes of such images in total.


Figure E Organized by type, files are best viewed in Normal Icons mode.

After reviewing all the BMP files, I deleted half and converted the other half to JPG format.

"Name"

The "Name" option sorts the files alphabetically and displays them in one huge list, which, in my opinion, does not make any sense. For example, my Documents library contains 25,000 files. The alphabetical list, of course, can be sorted and filtered, but in my opinion, this option is rather useless.

Other libraries

As I mentioned, in different libraries, the "Organize" feature offers different ways to group files depending on the type of content. Each of these methods provides a unique representation of files. The ordering options for the Music, Pictures, and Video libraries are shown in Figure 1. F.

Hello everyone! I bet that nine out of ten people reading these lines do not know how to arrange files in a folder in Windows 10 by sorting and grouping, as well as display the desired columns:"A type", "Created Date", "Modified Date", "Size", etc?

How to organize files in a Windows 10 folder by sorting and grouping, and display the desired columns:"Type", "Date created", "Date modified", "Size" and so on

One of our readers copied a group of files to a laptop with Windows 10 installed and they looked like this in the folder, that is, it was not clear what type and size they were. Here is a detailed letter from a reader:

"Hi admin! I have a good friend with whom I study at the university and he records all lectures on a dictaphone, then listens to them at home. I took and with his permission copied all the lectures to my computer, the copied files in the folder look like this.

And on my friend's laptop, all folders contain information about the type, date of creation, size, and even the duration of the sound file.

Moreover! If he copies more files to this folder, then they will all be sorted into groups.

I also want to organize the files in the folder this way! How can I do it?»

Here is a letter!

Agree, friends, everything was noticed by an inexperienced user correctly, because if you install Windows 10 again, then there is no ordering of the location of files in folders and they can be said to be chaotic. The developer does this on purpose, giving the user a choice.

make adjustments to your liking, and make it very easy.

Go to the "View" tab and choose to display files in the "Table" folder.

We right-click on the top column bar and in the drop-down menu check the necessary column contents: type, size, etc.

If you want, drag the names of the required columns closer to the files with the left mouse button for convenience.

That's all.

Yes, I almost forgot, if you click "Details", then the choice of columns will be even more diverse.

If you copy more files to this folder, but with other extensions, then just right-click on the free space of the folder and group by"T yipu » , as a result, all files in the folder will be ordered. If you wish, you can group files by name, size, etc.

You can reset the grouping settings by clicking on "No" and then all changes will be reset.

If there is a whole bunch of photos and videos on the computer, and all this is scattered in different folders, then sometimes you want to look at pictures from a certain period of time (for example, for a year) and it turns out to be oh, how not easy!

Of course, you can collect everything together, put it in one folder, but you still have to organize all this stuff by years, months, or otherwise, depending on how you need it.

Consider 2 ways to organize photos and videos (together or separately, no difference) so that you can easily navigate, even if there are a lot of files, for example, several thousand.

The easiest and most convenient way to organize all the photos and videos so that you can easily navigate them is to group them all in the so-called Windows library (or several).

WHAT ARE WINDOWS FILE LIBRARIES

Libraries are separate folders that group files according to a certain attribute (for example, music, images, videos, general) and allow you to work with these files more conveniently, for example, if you take images or videos, you can arrange them by date, which is normal folders do not.

The following libraries are initially created on Windows:

  • Video;
  • Images;
  • Documentation;
  • Music.

Accordingly, each of them is intended for a certain type of files, which is clear from the names.

Libraries are displayed directly in Windows Explorer, in the column on the left:

You can rename the libraries as needed. For example, it is not necessary to split videos and images into separate libraries. Yes, it will be more correct and more orderly, but it may be convenient for someone to put everything in one pile, both photos and videos. In this case, you can rename the "Images" library, for example, to "Videos and Photos" and add both there and then. The “Images” library itself will also allow you to arrange the videos correctly, since the settings of these libraries are very similar.

You can also create new libraries if you wish. But usually this is not necessary. Since the defaults already available are enough for any type of file.

ORGANIZING PHOTOS / VIDEOS IN LIBRARIES

Transferring photo / video collections to the library

The first thing to do is to transfer all your photos and videos scattered around your computer to one or more libraries. Decide right away whether you will store photos and videos separately, i.e. in different libraries, as originally conceived in Windows, or all on the heap. Let me remind you that you can do this and that and everything will work.

According to your choice, collect all the photos and videos from your computer in the appropriate folders: "Pictures" and "Videos" (or all in "Pictures").

If the computer is such a mess that it is difficult to manually find all the photos and videos scattered in different folders, then you can use the WinDirStat program to help. It allows you to evaluate which files (by category) take up space on your computer and where they are located.

Photos and videos should be moved to folders, not libraries. You can find the “Pictures”, “Videos” and other folders in your user folder (for old operating systems), or in the This PC section (for newer systems, such as Windows 10).

The libraries themselves are formed just from some of these folders.

If you already had photos and videos in some other folders, then you can transfer them entirely in folders. It is not necessary to move files separately. Example:

Sort by dates

After you have moved your entire collection to the “images” and “videos” folders or to one of them, open the corresponding library through the “Libraries” section (shown above). Initially, there will be no order there, of course. Everything will look something like this:

But since the collection is now in the library, it's easy to organize everything by date.

To do this, click on an empty space in the library with the right mouse button (hereinafter referred to as “RMB”) and select “arrange”, then select the value “day” or “month”. If you select “month”, your collection will be sorted by month, with the year next to it. Example:

And now you can open a specific month and see photos for this period. Getting into the folder of the selected month, the photos in it will already be sorted by day (see below).

If you select “day”, the entire collection in the folder will be sorted, respectively, by day:

By clicking on the arrows next to a certain day, you can hide the photo / video for that day:

If you want to unorder, i.e. to turn on the normal view, then in the “Organize” menu, select “Folder”.

Note! Windows organizes photos and videos primarily by “date taken” (for photos) and “Date created media” (for videos). These parameters are usually set to the file by the device itself, on which the shooting was carried out. You can see and change them through the file properties (RMB on the file and select “Properties”), in the “Details” tab.

Video media creation date

If for some reason this data is not in the file (for example, the device did not create it when shooting), then the photos and videos will be sorted by the date the file was created:

But this is not good, because the creation date of the file changes every time it is copied to a different folder, to a different disk, etc. It's best to always include the date the photo was taken and the date the media was created!

More “fine” filtering by dates

You can filter your collections even more finely, for example, select a specific day or range of days (weeks, months, etc.) for which you want to display photos / videos.

Before that, you need to change the file display option to “table”. To do this, right-click in the window area, select “view” - “table”. The files in the folder will be displayed in the form of a table, indicating the date, size and other parameters in the corresponding cells:

Now, by clicking to the right of the “Dates” column, you can select a specific day or range of dates, weeks, months, years. For example, we want to display photos / videos only for the dates from November 11, 2016 to November 30 of the same year. Select the range with the mouse and all elements that do not correspond to the specified dates will disappear in the explorer window.

If you need to cancel filtering, then also open the window of the selected filter and uncheck it (see image above).

Ability to group files according to different criteria

In addition to sorting the collection by dates, you can also group by certain criteria, for example, by file type, and in this case, all displayed files will be conveniently grouped. Example:

From the example above, we see that 3 groups have been created, by file types, the unnecessary of which can be collapsed so as not to interfere. This is useful when there are a large number of different files in a folder, when you need to view only files of certain types. For example, we want to separate photos and videos by grouping them appropriately. By selecting grouping by file type, we will see separately video files grouped by file type (MP4, MOV, etc.) and photos grouped similarly (JPG, PNG, etc.).

To perform grouping, right-click in the desired folder, select “Grouping” and in the submenu that opens, specify the desired grouping option, for example, “Type” (just “by file type”, as described above in the example).

There are different grouping options besides the file type. If the desired option is not in the list (it happens that the “Type” option is also missing), in the grouping submenu, click “Details”.

In the window that opens, check the boxes for the grouping options that you will use and click “OK”. They will now appear in the list of grouping options.

If you want to cancel the grouping, select "None" in the list of options.

You should be aware that grouping is not available if you have selected any ordering option, such as “month” or “day”. Grouping only works when ordering is disabled, i.e. “folder” option is selected (see above).

CONCLUSION

In fact, for those who have a large collection of photos and videos, it will always be important to be able to quickly organize everything by date or group it. It is convenient and very easy to do.

If you have something to add or any questions about the article, leave it in the comments, I won’t miss anything! :)

Do you have a lot of photos and videos stored on your computer? :) How do you hover in your multimedia collections?

Most people use the Microsoft Office Word text editor quite often. This program is very common and is an essential tool for creating text documents. You use it for personal purposes, to create abstracts, or at work for reports and other documentation. The interface and functions of this program are quite clear. It is very easy to work with it, and you can even make a basic text file intuitively without special training. But it seems so only at first glance. This editor, believe me, can work wonders if you know how to work with it.

One of the most useful features is the creation of a list sorted alphabetically. This is very useful for filtering data, for the correct sequence of elements in the text, for illustrations of certain facts, for creating a list of references, etc. However, not all users can make such an element.

Alphabetical listing is easy and simple. In order to design it, you need to follow these points:

Video: Sort alphabetically