Discovering Windows 7 – Awesome Explorer

Who would have thought that the work ‘awesome’ could possible be used near ‘explorer’. I mean, no one ever goes “Dude, windows explorer is awesome!”. Ever. I though that those words together should be called a ‘grammatical mistake’ :p

It is totally not the case now. Even after months of using Win7 I, almost everyday, keep discovering new features and ingenuities.

I was trying to fix tag information for the music I recently got from amardeep. He never has neatly organised data. So I was doing the usual. Select a group of files >Right click> Properties > Details tab and fill it up or something similar can be done from Media Player’s library but with only the advantage of a smoother UI. Right?

I then noticed details pane in the lower part smoothly displaying all the tag info. Some elements were missing so I did the obvious (Right Click) and sure enough there as a menu to control the details and a couple options. I chose the large size to see more property elements.



I intuitively moved my mouse over the displayed data and noticed the value getting highlighted as if they could be edited. I was like wow that is great. No need go to the details pane. Just select files and you are a bunch of clicks/steps faster. You dont have to repeat the RightClick>Prop>Details for each group of files you select to edit.



It was great discovery up till now but as soon as I moved to try something more complex it became awesome. Lets take the example of a folder I have called ‘Top Singles’ where I keep the latest hits and add new numbers as they hit the top (pretty great method to only filter and collect the best songs only). In such a folder the tags are hard to manage as you cant group them because they are from different artists/albums etc. This method greatly reduced the effort required in such places.

Earlier I had to create and update a bunch of playlists there to manage updates in single folder. For e.g. if I want to listen to a particular week’s updates hits in the order they were in at that time.. impossible right? Just try it..

Anyway, I started editing some tags with this method and, you are gonna love it, then came the biggest ‘aaaaaah’ from my mouth. Just as I started typing the edit fields came alive with real-time suggestions based on my library! Don’t believe me? have a look -



At the very least this feature completely kills the misspelling mistake (which resulted in really bad looking library like artists would have ‘Kailas’ and ‘Kailash’. Really messing up playback selction. In addition it further speeds up the task and offers us a strong overview in cases where, say, we forgot the artist name/spelling etc.

I wondered what else can we do with this thing.. and it occurred to me -  the search field! I went to the top directory and entered  a search for which I knew the results were spread out in many folders.

Here is a search for “List top songs or music videos since June 2008 by Beyonce or Eminem” :D


This was just a forced complex search. Now imagine this(search, live suggestions tags etc) for all files and documents! Tagging made super easy which in turn makes further searching and tagging easier. It is an exponential relationship. And dont forget Windows media center and other network stream devices that Win7 can attach to. It makes navigating on them many times easier. Even more mind boggling is, try to associate this with the open search filters/addon capability of Windows 7. Like searching last.fm or flickr or even a torrent site in inclusion to you network, Homegroup and libraries!

Tell me you are in love, shout aloud “Awesome Explorer” :)