Windows 8 Bible

Selecting Icons

You will often find that you want to perform some operation on many files. For example, let’s say you want to copy a couple dozen files to an external disk. You could do them one at a time, but that would take a lot of time and effort. It would be better and easier to select all the icons you want to copy, and copy them all in one fell swoop.

As you’ll see, you can select icons in many ways. As always, there is no right way or wrong way, no good way or bad way. It’s usually a matter of choosing the method that is easiest for you, or is best for whatever you’re trying to accomplish.

Note

How you select icons depends largely on whether you’re using the double-click or single-click method to open icons. If you don’t know what that’s about, see “To Click or Double-Click?” in Chapter 27.

Thumbnails for pictures and videos are icons, too. So all the techniques described in this chapter apply to thumbnails.

Selecting one icon

Selecting a single icon is easy. If you’re using the double-click method to open documents or programs, you click (once) on the icon you want to select. If you’re using the single-click method to open icons, you just point to the icon (rest the tip of the mouse pointer right on the icon you want to select). The selected icon will be highlighted to stand out from the others. The toolbar will likely change to reflect things you can do with that selected icon. If the Details pane is open, it will show information about the selected icon, as illustrated ...