When you right-click on an empty space in an Explorer folder and select the New menu item, you always start with Folder and Shortcut, but the rest seems to be a jumbled list of file types.
| Folder |
| Shortcut |
| Microsoft Access Database |
| Bitmap image |
| Contact |
| Microsoft Word Document |
| Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation |
| Microsoft Publisher Document |
| Rich Text Document |
| Text Document |
| Microsoft Excel Worksheet |
| Compressed (zipped) folder |
The list looks jumbled, but it’s a very specific kind of jumbled.
The items in the New menu are discovered by looking for ShellNew subkeys in HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT. And a side effect of the way Explorer walks through the registry and collects the results is that they end up sorted alphabetically by file extension.
| Folder | |
| Shortcut | |
| .accdb | Microsoft Access Database |
| .bmp | Bitmap image |
| .contact | Contact |
| .docx | Microsoft Word Document |
| .pptx | Microsoft PowerPoint Presentation |
| .pub | Microsoft Publisher Document |
| .rtf | Rich Text Document |
| .txt | Text Document |
| .xlsx | Microsoft Excel Worksheet |
| .zip | Compressed (zipped) folder |
This behavior is not contractual. It’s just an artifact of the implementation. Maybe it’ll change someday.
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