Windows 7 Focus: Libraries (6801)

Ok, nice feature – but the Win-E key press now brings up the “Libraries” instead of “Computer”… which I think is going to annoy people before they even look at it I can imagine a legion of posters are currently navigating to the MS forums demanding they change it back, so lets leave them to it and move forward to talk about the feature and see if we like the change…

Pressing Win-E now displays:

Did the sky just fall? No? Good, lets continue Libraries are Windows 7′s approach to arranging your file system without actually having to physically move everything round. I must confess to not liking it much initially but it has definitely grown on me and I now find myself using it as my primary “go to” place. If you don’t like it at first, I suggest giving it some time as it is rather useful.

It works by having a series of logical containers that things are mapped to, kind of like the search folders that were removed from the original Longhorn builds. Each folder has a base folder it is associated and more folders can be added from both your local disks and around the network.

As an example lets look at the “Downloads” library. I normally use a folder on my laptop’s d:\ called “Applications” for dropping random downloads in so I don’t end up with rubbish all over my disk. I also have a more structured fileshare on the servers used as a repository for the whole company where I put the more useful downloads. I can add these locations to the library giving me:

The view you get when clicking on the downloads library is a combination of everything in the included folders. If you want a more specific view of one particular folder you can navigate down to it:

When saving things from the Internet, the default save location is the Downloads library:

Notice that it displays the root of the library and shows everything contained in the included folders, but you can still save directly to this folder. How do you know which of the included locations it will save the file to? Easy, it saves it to the “Default Save Location” which is set in the same place as you add/remove locations:

So in this case saving to the root of the Downloads Library saves the file to the physical D:\Applications folder, but it doesn’t matter really as it all shows up in the root library view anyway

Thats pretty much how they work so lets look at some of the others:

· The Music library is tied into WMP, so adding the my music folder D:\music adds the location straight into WMP.

· The Documents library means I can add my local work folder and my user space on the company network

· The Contacts/Communications have libraries included for Outlook to search email/contacts and I guess more will be added as time goes on to make this a one stop place to find things.

In case you are wondering, no – you are not just stuck with the default libraries as you can easily make your own to suit whatever need you have:

I like Libraries