Carrots can provide useful shortcuts for navigation and decluttering your screen. You can find them almost anywhere on your screen. You’ve likely seen them and never paid much attention to them.
The carrot symbol ^ can be pointed in any of four directions on a screen – up, down, left, right – and carrots are most useful in File Explorer and Outlook, although they’re not exclusive to those apps.
Most of us will find carrots useful for doing a quick search in File Explorer. If you look at the upper left corner of File Explorer, you’ll see three listings: Home, Gallery, and your OneDrive. In Home, for example, you might find a screen to the right that shows > Recommended on the top row and > Recent, Favorites, Shared. If one of those three folders is highlighted, you can click on it and get a listing of files for a quick search. You can then open a selected file or simply collapse the listing by clicking on the downward-pointing carrot.
In the next grouping on the left, clicking on Documents or Pictures, for example, opens a dropdown menu of folders and subfolders (showing as many levels of subfolders as you have) to give you a quick look at your files. We’ve found it quicker to search this way than scrolling through our folder or subfolder lists of Documents or Pictures.
Farther down on the left are This PC and Network. Clicking the > carrots will show you more information about files on your PC or devices connected to your network. Again, they’re easily collapsable.
Similarly with Outlook, you can use carrots to expand or collapse your Favorites and the contents of each mailbox (account) that you have through Outlook. This can help you keep your screen less cluttered and more organized, helping to navigate the contents of each account more efficiently.
Working in Microsoft Word, if you keep the ribbon open and expanded across the top, you can access more options by using carrots for things such as fonts, sizes, colors, bullets in bullet lists, etc.
We encourage you to look for carrots in File Explorer, Outlook, and your Office apps. Looking at the results of each click may lead you to a new shortcut that makes your computing life easier.