File Type

• text documents
• spread sheets
• presentation files
• pictures and images
• sound and video files

These files are organized – like their counterparts in the ‘real’ world – in folders, a simple and efficient way to ascertain a minimum of overview. You put – you save – the files in folders, and a very important difference to the ‘real’ world is, you can also put folders in folders. This you can do virtually endlessly, and thus you get the well known folder tree: a hierarchical representation of your organization of folders and files. Again this is not really that different from a ‘real’ filing system where you also have to keep track of the location of the file – if you ever want to read it again.

All the operations you do with the real files, also you can and must do with your computer files:

• find and locate
• open, change, rename, and close
• copy, move, backup, or delete

When you do this with the inbuilt Windows ‘file manager’, you will very soon end up with a unbelievable number of open windows, working much with cutting and pasting, fighting with views and finding locations, all of which make quite a few software companies selling commercial file managers rich.

But fortunately writing a good filemanager has also been a challenge to the freeware community, and so today we find a few outstanding freeware solutions in that field. Our expectations toward such a software have risen, we are no longer satisfied with a filemanager that is simply better than the Windows approach.