Folder View is an add-on for Windows that drastically enhances the way you browse the folders on your system. Files are often scattered around many different folders on the harddisk and locations on the network. Every time you want to copy, move, open or save a file, this situation leads you to a quest through levels of folders. With Folder View, these quests are over. Folder View adds a toolbar to the Windows Explorer. With this toolbar, you can navigate to every folder you use. Every folder you like can be added, no matter where they reside: on the hard disk, a removable drive or a network.

After installing FV, a Configuration Wizard asked me to select a “Main Folder”, which was “My Documents” or my user folder by default. The folders contained in the Main Folder became buttons in Explorer’s toolbar and context menu, in the tray icon, and in Open/Save dialogs (but not in Vista). Clicking on a button opened a cascading (fly-out) menu of folders, letting me explore the directory structure.

For example, I added “c:\” as a button, then I could access any folder on that drive from FV’s cascading menu. I really liked this capability. FV also added a “Recent” button that showed recently accessed folders.

One major disappointment was that the menus did not show files, only folders (unlike explorer’s own cascading toolbar menus). So I could not access any files directly from the cascading menus. This was a severe limitation for me because I like to launch files from cascading menus. This should at least be an option. Folder View effectively offers quick access to my favorite and recent folders from the toolbar and context menu in Explorer. The cascading (fly-out) menus and the toolbar additions are excellent features that are rarely found in other programs. Everything but the Open/Save dialog add-on worked in both Vista and Windows 7. But I would like to see more customizability, the ability to access files, and additional features. Some of the functionality can be found in Explorer alone, by simply adding a folder toolbar to the taskbar.