Features — Category

One of the recent things I’ve been doing in Vista is playing around with stacks. A new view in Windows Explorer in Vista is to stack your files into groups by attribute. In reality, it is a bunch of searches for specific files with pretty icons. To stack folders, you can click on the arrow next to the heading you want to stack (say, Name) and selecting “Stack by Name”. You’ll then get lots of icons with files holding a certain name.

This can be helpful in certain situations. One of the things I like to keep organised is my music. In XP, I would’ve had to create a folder to each artist, then another for each album. In Vista, I can do half that work automatically.

I just type “kind:music” in the search box, then go Artist → Stack by Artist, and all my music is magically put into virtual folders. (We first type kind:music because of the folder images that can add unnecessary cruft).

Now I can double-click on an artist and get all the music by that artist.

But, what if I want to get a certain album? Well, this is why I said “half that work automatically.” It cannot remember stacks within stacks, but you can still do so. Just go Album → Stack by Album. The music is then stacked by album.

You can navigate the stacks just like any folder from the folder tree as well.

Now you may think this all useless because you can’t access this in Open dialogs. You are mistaken. Click on the Save Search button in Explorer to save it to your Saved Searches folder (or anywhere else for that matter). Then, open up an Open dialog box somewhere, goto Saved Searches and double-click your new search. Tah-da!

I finish off this post with a tip that not even US PC World knew. If you are finding the icons too large or too small, you can quickly resize them by holding down Ctrl and rolling the mouse wheel - roll up to make them bigger, roll down to make them smaller. The thing PC World didn’t mention in the article above was that this applies to the desktop as well. Just go to your desktop then Ctrl+Mouse Wheel. And yes, if you make the icons 32×32 (the old size), the shortcut icon will overlap a quarter of the icon. Just scroll down one more and it won’t.