How to Edit the Author Field in Windows 7 Explorer?

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Organizing files in Windows 7, particularly for articles and books, can be challenging due to limitations in editing the 'author' field. While users can arrange files by author in Windows Explorer, editing this field directly is not possible for most file types, including PDFs. Multimedia files allow for some editable properties, but PDFs lack this functionality, which has frustrated users who previously had this option in Windows XP. There is speculation that Microsoft may have intentionally restricted compatibility with non-Windows formats, impacting user experience. Overall, while file organization by author is feasible, editing the author field remains a significant limitation in Windows 7.
AndyUrquijo
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Hi everyone,

I own a pc with Windows 7 and I need help to organize my files, specially the folders with articles and books. What I want to do is to edit the ‘author’ field. This way I can search books by this parameter if they have common names such as "Quantum Mechanics Vol I"

I could do this with Windows XP before so I hope it’s still possible here. If you can’t do this with the explorer’s options, is there any property editor available on the web?
 
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Do you actually want to edit the author field, or just select files based on the value in the author field?

You can display only the files authored by a particular person in Win 7. In Windows Explorer, at the upper right corner there is a control titled Arrange by. This control has a drop-down menu with Author, Date modified, and other menu options. Click Author to arrange the files by their author. You can choose one or more authors whose files should be displayed.

As far as actually editing the author for a file, I don't believe you can do that in Win Explorer, and I don't think you could do it in Win XP, either.
 
I want to edit the author field.

This was possible! Actually in win7 you can still do this easily with multimedia files. In the properties dialog there is an aditional set of editable properties such as interpeter, genre etc.

Well any editable property would be fine actually. I wouldn't mind having a file with extension '.D_Griffiths'. But this is not possible in windows :(
 
Borg said:
Have you tried this?

I have. It seems pdf files don't have any editable properties. Which is stupid... way to go windows!
 
AndyUrquijo said:
I have. It seems pdf files don't have any editable properties. Which is stupid... way to go windows!
I'm using XP and there is an editable author field for pdf files. I don't know if it's been stripped off in Windows 7 but, it doesn't make sense that they would take that away. Can you see the author field on doc files?
 
Borg said:
Can you see the author field on doc files?

Yes. Its visible/editable in several other (windows) types as well... but not pdf. My guess is that they are just sore about microsoft word losing popularity. So they create compatibility issues with non-windows formats (they did it even to their own older formats).
 
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