by Ryan Johnson, technology training coordinator

I stumbled upon this neat little trick to easily rename a file very quickly. Normally when renaming a file you in Explorer or on my desktop, I single click on a file name, wait a sec, and then single click again to rename a file.

But when you press F2 after selecting a file name is that the name is highlighted – so if you start typing, whatever was there will simply be replaced (minus the file extension, which remains unhighlighted, so you’re less likely to change it accidentally). This can be handy if you really do need a completely different name for your file, but annoying if you just wanted to tweak the name a bit (say, add _OLD to the end of it, or something, for archiving purposes). If you are looking to just adjust the current name, you can use your right arrow key (or the down one) to jump to the end of the file name. You can also just click somewhere in the middle of the file name, wherever you need to edit – and your computer will know not to interpret that click as a double-click-to-open procedure. In fact, if you do double-click at that point, it will be like double-clicking text – the nearest word-like entity will be highlighted instead.

By the way, curious how you do the same thing but on a Mac? No F2 even needed – just click the file once, and then press Return (Mac’s equivalent to Enter), and edit away!