See expanded Send To menus in Windows Explorer

Now here’s a head-scratcher of a Windows 7 shortcut. The puzzling part is why Microsoft even made it necessary! 

Many of us are familiar, from earlier versions of Windows, with the Send To command in Windows Explorer. In a nutshell: If you right-click on a file in Windows Explorer, one of the options in the menu that pops up, Send To, lets you move the file to certain locations, such as to a zipped folder or onto a local/network drive. 

Simple enough. But in Windows 7 you have the option to see an extended list of Send To destinations by using a shortcut.

In 7, before you right-click on that file, hold down the Shift key. Once the context menu pops up, release Shift and left-click on the Send To menu item as you normally would. You’ll likely see, depending on your PC, that the number of Send To items has increased substantially versus if you hadn’t held down Shift. Here's what we saw, with the expnded Send To menu at left, and the "normal" one at right:
 

 
On our test system, we saw the former “My” folders (Documents, Music, and so on) now appear in the list. The Windows Desktop itself is also given as a possible destination for your file.
Our big beef here is why we need to hold down Shift at all; the extra Send To menu items are handy, but there’s not a whole lot of reason for Microsoft to have required an extra step to access them, that we can see. Well, at least there’s room for improvement in Windows 8.

Select multiple items in Windows Explorer the easy way

It’s a familiar problem: You’re facing a folder full of MP3 files or vacation photos, and you want to copy out (or perhaps delete) only certain ones en masse. Everyone knows the old way: Hold down the Ctrl key while you click on each file with the mouse, highlighting the specific ones on which you want to take action. We’ve all been there, and we’ve all had it go wrong: Take your eye off it for a second, and you deselect (or select) the whole group. Time to start over again!

There’s an easier way in Windows 7, though you need to dig a bit to activate it. In a given folder, click on the Organize button at the top of the Windows Explorer window. Choose the Folder and search options entry from the menu that ensues, to launch the Folder Options dialog box. You’ll see three tabs; click the one called View. In the Advanced settings list that appears, scroll down and look for the entry Use check boxes to select items. Make sure it has, um, a check mark in it, then hit OK. We circled the appropriate option here:

In the relevant folder, if you’re looking at it in a file-thumbnail view, you’ll now see empty check boxes next to the files’ individual thumbnails. Otherwise, if you’re in a list or detail view, check boxes will appear if you hover your cursor just to the left of the line items, like they do here:

Check these boxes off, as desired, to select multiple files in a folder for mass action. It’s a lot more accurate and less nerve-wracking.