I assume he was talking about displaying objects in a folder.
In Windows you can display objects in a folder in a number of "views" such as icon view, list view, thumbnail view and so on.
You normally change the "view" with one of the menus at the top of the folder.
In XP it is the "view" menu and there are about 6 different views to chose from (Vista does it slightly differently).
So he said select the "detail" view.
That will give you the name of the object, the size, the type, and the date in different columns, like this:
http://ftp.pcworld.com/pub/screencams/rename03 .jpg.
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