Windows XP in a Nutshell, Second Edition

The Properties window (sometimes called the Properties sheet) is a dialog box that serves a very specific purpose: to display and allow changes to the settings associated with a file, folder, or other object in Windows. Most objects have Properties sheets, almost always accessible by right-clicking and selecting Properties, as shown in Figure 3-19. (You can also display Properties by holding Alt and double-clicking, or if the item is already highlighted, by pressing Alt-Enter.) Many items in the Control Panel can be quickly accessed by right-clicking on various interface elements and selecting Properties; for example:

• My Network Places icon Properties points to Network Connections

• Empty portion of the Desktop Properties points to Display Properties

• My Computer icon Properties points to System Properties

• Taskbar or Start button Properties points to Taskbar and Start Menu Properties

• Clock (in the notification area) Properties points to Time and Date Properties

At minimum, most Properties sheets will have a General tab, but most have more. Note that the particular information and settings available depend entirely on the object that was clicked.

Notes

• Folders, printers, and disk drives have a second property tab called Sharing. See Chapter 7 for details. Shortcuts to MS-DOS and command- line-based programs have additional settings for legacy support.

• To see the amount of disk space used by a group of files, select them and then view the Properties entry for the selected list. On the first tab, you'll see the size of the whole group. Change any of the attributes, and the change will be applied to all of the files in the selected group. (Unfortunately, if any of the files in the selected group has a different attribute from other files in the group , the checkbox for that attribute will be grayed out, so this does not work in all cases. This poor user interface design was discussed in "Combo Boxes", earlier in this chapter.)

• Certain types of files, such as Microsoft Word files, will have additional property pages that are generated by the application that created them. Word files, for example, have pages that let you summarize and view the statistics for documents.

• Among the settings in a Properties sheet for files are the Attributes (Read-only, Hidden, and Archive). See "Attrib" in Chapter 4 for details.

• In previous versions of Windows, the Properties sheet also contained the " MS-DOS name ," the eight-character " short filename," plus a three-character extension. Since Windows XP has better support for long filenames, it's assumed that this information is no longer necessary. If you need a short filename for a file or folder, type dir /x at a command prompt (see Chapter 6 for details).