Using the Windows Vista address bar

Q. How do I use the Windows Vista address bar?

A. In previous versions of Windows, the address bar in Windows Explorer was a text string (as the figure shows) which could be edited. But since it's unlikely you would know the names of subfolders that form the path, often you needed to navigate your computer using the navigation pane, which gives a hierarchical, traversable view of the computer.In Vista and later versions, the address bar still displays the current location, but it now has drop-down menus for every component of the current navigation path allowing easy backtracking of the path to other locations or even moving forward to an alternative to the current folder as the figure shows. At the far left of the dialog box is also a drop-down menu that shows all the available areas of the computer (e.g., drives, shared folders, Control Panel). If you right-click the address bar, you also have options to "Copy Address" which pastes the object in the navigation bar. For example, if you copy the address, you can then paste this onto another folder to copy the folder and its content. You can “Copy Address as Text,” which places a textual representation of the address in the clipboard (e.g., D:MultimediaMusicLudwig van BeethovenEssential Beethoven Disc 1), and finally you can select “Edit Address” if you don’t want to navigate to a folder and would prefer to just type in the name.

—John Savill