In my experience, dired is one of the most underused modes of Emacs. Just C-xC-f to any directory in your hard disk and you'll be presented with a list of its files and directories. One can browse this list, and execute all kinds of commands and transformations on them. If you've never done that before, just give it a try, and look at the menubar for a list of nifty things you can do inside dired.
The nice thing about Emacs is that every time I go looking I find some more built-in functionality that saves even more time.....
