Comments on: How can I make Win XP display my files in forward alphabetical order (a to z)?

Question: How can I make Win XP display my files in forward alphabetical order (a to z)?

ascullion — Fri, 28 May 2004 10:25:46 -0800

Win XP is displaying my files in backwards alphabetical order (z-->a, not a-->z). I can't get it to switch back (I've tried - any ideas what I can do? (I've tried using explorer to reset all folders).

By: badstone

badstone — Fri, 28 May 2004 10:35:33 -0800

You do know that you can click the little tabs at the top of the various columns (Name, Size, Type, Date, etc...) to set which one it sorts by and that by clicking repeatedly you reverse the sort order, right? Just a sanity check...

By: ascullion

ascullion — Fri, 28 May 2004 10:39:20 -0800

Yeah, thanks - but I need something permanent. Doing that with every folder I open is doing my head in.

I'm starting to think this may be one of those unsolvable nightmares that requires a reinstall.

By: smackfu

smackfu — Fri, 28 May 2004 10:40:49 -0800

Sort them in the order you want, then hold down CTRL while you hit the X to close the window.

By: ascullion

ascullion — Fri, 28 May 2004 10:43:00 -0800

MY God, that worked! Thanks so much - where does one acquire such information?

By: smackfu

smackfu — Fri, 28 May 2004 11:37:05 -0800

Vague memories of randomly running across this, corrected by Google.

By: signal

signal — Fri, 28 May 2004 12:08:27 -0800

The real question is, why is this not documented by MS itself?

By: riffola

riffola — Fri, 28 May 2004 13:07:30 -0800

Microsoft doesn document most keyboard shortcuts in the help files and online.

By: riffola

riffola — Fri, 28 May 2004 13:07:53 -0800

That should be does not doesn.

By: hashashin

hashashin — Fri, 28 May 2004 14:26:12 -0800

I am also having this problem on XP, but I have only noticed it happening in the artist folders in the "My Music" folder. My music folder is organized with artist folders at the root level, and album folders within those. It seems that any time I open an artist folder I haven't looked at (and changed the sort order) recently, the albums will be in reverse alphabetical order. The contents of the album folders (the tracks themselves) rarely have this problem.

No amount of control-clicking seems to resolve the problem, unfortunately. The folders do seem to have "auto arrange" turned on, and I have set the "remember each folder's view settings" option, not that it works very consistently. I often return to a folder I haven't touched in a while to find that the sort order has reverted to backward-mode again.

The problem does occur with brand-new folders. If I rip a few CDs by the same artist, creating an artist folder and some album folders within it, the artist folder's contents will sort backwards and the albums will (generally) sort forwards.

More strangely, if I right-click on the folder in the explorer window and select "open," the contents in the new window are sometimes sorted correctly.

Reading that someone else had the problem gave me a moment of hope that perhaps I wasn't just cursed. Seeing that ascullion's problem was easily fixed, while mine persists, is making me reconsider the possibility of a curse.

By: Goofyy

Goofyy — Sat, 29 May 2004 06:55:52 -0800

I've been having EXACTLY this problem in Win98 for the past few weeks. I had not had this problem previously. I was wondering if it was someone's idea of a joke virus. It affects all my folders. It seemed like some folders, after a time, remembered I wanted them MY way, and stopped changing every time. Then they went suddenly back to backwards.