Decipher XP Explorer

How to personalise Explorer
Explorer can be modified easily to suit your needs and there’s a bewildering number of ways to customise the application. Let’s start with the main toolbar that runs horizontally across the top of the Explorer window.

Hover your mouse pointer over an unoccupied part of the toolbar where the buttons appear and right-click. In the menu that appears, items displayed with a tick are already on the toolbar; those without are not.

Add or remove the ticks to change their status. You can also select Customize to access more toolbar buttons, which can add tasks that you use often to the toolbar, saving you the effort of hunting them down through mouse menus –­ see the step-by-step guide which you can link to at the end of this feature. Once you’ve got the toolbar as you want it, right-click once again and select ‘Lock the Toolbars’.

Another handy way to make files easier to work with is to change the way they’re displayed in the window. Click View on the Toolbar and you’ll find six options that affect the size of icons and how much detail is shown for the collection of files or settings (or you can use the View button on the Toolbar).

If you select the option to show the full details of each file in the folder, there’s a way to filter out unhelpful information. Go to the View menu and select ‘Choose details…’ and a list of the fields that appear at the top of each column is shown. You can tick or untick the boxes next to each label to add or remove their corresponding fields.

These changes can also be made in the window –­ just right-click one of the fields to produce a list of common labels and if you’d like to adjust the order in which columns appear, click the grey bar at the top of the column and, keeping the mouse button held down, drag it left or right past the adjacent columns and release the mouse button to drop it in place.