How to manually arrange folders in windows 7__

Anonymous

When i try manually move one folder to be the first i can t whay

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Anonymous

Hello ivan099, welcome.

You can manually arrange desktop icons, however, any other icons within folders are auto-arranged and cannot be altered by direct access. You can arrange them in a multitude of different ways by right clicking open space (within a folder) and selecting Sort By > More...

A problem was discovered in Windows XP when users would accidentally manually arrange folders and icons and, in turn, they would overlap eachother. For simplicity's sake and for performance reasons, this feature was removed.

There are a number of 3rd-party programs that exist that allow you to do this, however, they would of course not be supported by Microsoft.

I would search the internet for 'File Manager', 'Alternate Shell', or something of the like. You may find some support forums that have users that specialize in just the exact thing you are looking for.

Hope this helps,

Thanks!

Ryan Thieman

Microsoft Answers Support Engineer

Visit our Microsoft Answers Feedback Forum and let us know what you think.

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48 additional answers

Anonymous

2013-10-05T14:44:02+00:00

Dear Ryan,

Actually, no, this wasn't at all helpful. Let me get this straight ... Rather than engineer a fix so that icons could not be placed on top of each other, Microsoft decided to just do away with allowing users to customize their Windows experience? Microsoft might want to check out all of the very unhappy chatter on the web about this decision and come up with a patch for it pronto. This kind of lazy thinking approach to a resolving a problem is not at all what one expects from Microsoft. I'm amazed that this decision made it past the first engineering meeting.

Jill,

Ryan is not the one you have a bone to pick with. He's doing his job and he answered your question and even offered you alternatives options on how to get what you want done. Abusing Ryan because you're unhappy with a Microsoft decision that was likely made many times removed from his position is not very thoughtful. I understand your frustration, but you need to work on not taking it out on others in a public forum that do not deserve it.
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Anonymous

2013-03-21T01:15:38+00:00

The developers removed the Auto-Arrange option in Windows 7. Either of these third party fixes will add it back so you can disable it.

How to Disable Auto Arrange in Folders in Windows 7? - The Winhelponline Blog

http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/disable-auto-arrange-folders-windows-7/

Windows 7 - Windows Explorer Auto Arrange - Disable

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/92758-windows-explorer-auto-arrange-disable.html
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Anonymous

2013-03-21T01:09:04+00:00

Hi D. Moses,

Could you please explain/detail how you do this ? Elimination of this feature has been very frustrating.

Thanks,

Dan
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Anonymous

2013-03-05T23:50:07+00:00

I've always named files or folders that represented dates (and that I want sorted in date order) in the format yyyy-mm-dd

So in your case, you could always name your photo folders 2010-01, 2010-02, 2010-03 etc. If you want the month name in there for easy reading tack it on the end: 2010-01 - January, 2010-02 - February etc.

Hope that helps somehow (it's a trick you'll probably find you'll need in Linux too).
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