11th February 2002
When I sit down to sort through content for upcoming issues, I often use my desktop as a temporary staging area. Before too long, I have 50+ icons arranged in an area (having a resolution of 1600x1200 helps). Outlook messages, Internet shortcuts, text files - all mixed together. Yesterday, I hit a problem. I wanted to drag and drop an Outlook message from the mail client onto the desktop, but it had the same file name as something already sitting there. Oops. I canceled the copy. Instead of manually sorting through all of those desktop objects to rename just one, I used my desktop toolbar (add it to your taskbar by right-clicking an open area, selecting Toolbars | Desktop. Now, push it to one side of your taskbar. Click the double-arrows, right-click on a listed object, select the "Sort by Name" option, locate the file in question, right-click it, then select "Rename." Likewise, I could have placed all of those items into a separate folder and sorted them by a different parameter. But I didn't want to do that; the desktop toolbar was already there.