About Windows Explorer (explorer.exe) in Windows 7

Some of you are a little confused by Windows 7's treatment of Windows Explorer, so please let me explain about it, and please bear with me if I'm going over something that is "old news" to you.

Windows Explorer in Windows 7 works pretty-much like it did in XP, but it may not be quite as easy to get at, so let me perhaps fix that problem for you right now.

There are two ways to open Windows Explorer in Windows 7 :- (1.) Right-click the Start orb and on the pop-up menu that appears, select the item that says "Open Windows Explorer". Left-clicking those words opens it. (2.) Left-click the Start orb, and go to (click on:) All Programs -> Accessories -> Windows Explorer.

In (2.) above, when you get to the Windows Explorer line in Accessories, instead of left-clicking it to open it, you can right-click on it, and hold down your clicker while you drag it out onto an open space on your desktop. There, when you release the right-click, you will see a little menu which will invite you to:-
*Copy Here
*Move Here
*Create Shortcuts Here
*Cancel
You can left-click on "Create Shortcuts Here" to put a shortcut icon of it on your desktop. Once you have that, you can drag it down onto your Taskbar where you will see another option to pin it to the Taskbar, for quick access to it. With its icon pinned to the Taskbar, you can right-click on that whenever you have several windows open on the desktop, and you can then choose the option to "Close all windows", and if you left-click on that, it closes all open windows.

Now then, if you look at the image of it here, you will see that parts of that left column's "tree" have little white or empty arrow-heads to the left of the various items in the list. Those are items that you haven't yet tried to do anything with. If you left-click on one of those little arrow-heads, it will turn from white to black and change direction from pointing to the right to pointing downward, and below it will open a supplementary branch of it showing whatever folders it contains within it. Left-clicking on any of those titles will open that folder in the main right-hand window.

If you're in that left-hand column, and you want to move folders from one place to another, and have them moved into a new folder in that tree's list, then you can drag and drop them just like you did with XP. The thing to perhaps remember is that in Windows 7, you need to look carefully for those tiny little arrow-heads and do the clicking right on them to make them open or close to show or hide whatever's inside them. But for rearranging folders, you can still use the drag-and-drop method just like before with XP.

So now you know how to get at Windows Explorer, and what to do with it once you have it handy. As you'll maybe notice in that screenshot of mine here, I have Windows Explorer pinned to the Taskbar right beside the Start button, where it is always handy.  You can do that too if you like. It saves a lot of looking for it.