Grouping icons
To group icons in the display, choose View › Arrange Icons By › Show in Groups. This option acts as
a toggle and, once selected, is automatically applied to whichever option you selected from the Arrange
Icons By menu. For example, Figure 2-24 shows the folders in my My Music folder arranged by name,
and displayed in groups. To turn off the grouping, choose View › Arrange Icons By › Show in Groups
again.
The Folders list and other bars
The Folders list available in Explorer provides a quick and easy way to jump to specific areas of your
computer and to folders on your hard disk. To open the Folders list, just click the Folders button on the
toolbar, or choose View › Explorer Bar › Toolbar from the menu. Figure 2-25 shows an example of
the Folders list on the left side of the Explorer window.
Figure 2-25: The Folders list open on one of my computers
You can expand and contract items in the list by clicking the plus sign (+, to expand) or the minus sign
(–, to contract) to the left of the item. The Folders list provides a quick alternative to “drilling down”
through folders to get to a specific subfolder. For example, the computer represented in Figure 2-25 has
a folder named Art Parts within a folder named Clip Art, which in turn is contained within the My Pictures
folder of My Documents. Without the Folders list open, I would have to work my way down to that folder.
Which is to say, that in My Documents I’d need to open My Pictures. Then in that folder I would need to
open Clip Art, and then finally Art Parts. In the Folders list, however, I can just click the Art Parts folder
to jump to it directly, no matter where I happen to be at the moment.