This Windows Tips and Tricks Tutorial cover more advanced material than what were represented in the two basic tutorials. The material does not focus on a specific version of Windows, but a lot of this Windows tips and tricks were already functional since Widows 3.1 and is still very useable in Windows XP.

Object Selection Tricks

The Windows tips and tricks discussed in the following section will help you speed up the selection of objects whether it be files in Windows Explorer or email messages in Outlook Express. For the purpose of this exercise create a folder on the desktop and name it Selection Exercise. When finished go to the My Documents folder and select a few folders by drawing a rectangle with the mouse over around them. To do this the best approach is to start just slightly to the right of the topmost folder you plan to select and then drag with the mouse to the left and downwards to the last folder you plan to select. Now right-click on any of the folders that forms part of the selection and then left-click on copy. Open the Selection Exercise folder that you have created on the desktop and double-click on it. Right-click anywhere on a blank area in this folder and left-click on paste. Just to make absolutely sure that you are not going to permanently delete important files, go and make sure that the folders that you originally copied from My Documents is still there. If everything is Ok go back to the Selection Exercise folder. 

In above explanation you've already seen how the mouse can be used to select multiple folders by dragging a rectangle around them. The next step is to demonstrate how you can enhance the selection ability of the mouse by using the Shift or Ctrl keys on the keyboard together with the mouse. Lets start by using the Shift key together with the mouse. Click on the first folder you plan to select and hold down the Shift key on the keyboard. While keep holding down the shift key click on the last folder you plan to select. Holding down the Shift key cause the selection to be extended to all folders situated between the two folders you have clicked on. You can now execute any operation on these selected folders by right-clicking on any of them and selecting the desired command. Note that it does not matter which folder of the selected ones you right-click on, because whatever command you select from the pop-up menu will be applied to all the selected folders.

To select multiple folders that is not adjacent to each other hold down the Ctrl key and click on all the required folders one by one. When finished you can right-click on any folder that is part of the selection and execute whatever command is available from the pop-up menu. This will be applied to all the folders that is part of the selection.

Just to round of this first explanation of this Windows tips and tricks page lets take some special circumstances in to account. Say you've got 20 folders in front of you and you want to delete 17 of them and the other 3 need to stay just as they are. The fastest approach will be to draw a rectangle around the folders to select them or hold down the Shift key and then click on the first and last folder you want selected. The next step is to hold down the Ctrl key and then click on each of the 3 folders that should not be selected. Clicking on a folder while holding down the Ctrl key toggles its selection state. So if it was selected it will change to be not selected or vice versa.

Locating a File Very Quickly

Continuing with this Windows Tips and Tricks tutorial I will now discuss how to quickly locate a file you want to open. This functionality is present in the Windows operating system since the early version since I cannot remember when I first started using it.

I will take Microsoft FrontPage as an example for demonstration purposes in this second section of the Windows tips and tricks page, but you may use any application that you frequently use and have a lot of files available for on disk in one location. To really demonstrate the usefulness of this trick there have to be a lot of files for this application available in the specific folder. Now click on File and then on Open. Navigate to the folder where the most files is located. Lets take for example that I'm looking for the file index.html and I have to scroll through hundreds of files to locate it. Instead of scrolling proceed as follow. Click on the first file name you see. Now press the "i" key on the keyboard. The Open File dialogue box will now jump to the first file or folder it locates that have a name that starts with "i". If it selects the file name you are looking for, just hit the Enter key and the file will be opened. Should the selected file not be the one you are looking for you can continue pressing "i" until the correct file is selected or it should be now either visible or in close scrolling range. Then double-click with the mouse to open it.

Above trick demonstrates how a file can quickly be located in a software application's Open Dialogue box by clicking on any file you see and then pressing the character on the keyboard with which the file name starts. This should take you straight to the file or in very close range. Occasionally it happens that when you press the character on the keyboard the file get accidentally renamed. If this happens you should press the Esc key on the keyboard immediately before doing anything else as it will re-instate the file's original name. Lastly I should just mention that you can also press Shift and Tab simultaneously as soon as the Open File dialogue box appear as you do not have to click on a file name then. Press whatever character the file name starts with after pressing Shift and Tab. That's it for this section of Windows tips and tricks, but for some more time saving Windows Tips and Tricks see the Windows Tutorial (Basics - Part 1).

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