From the course: macOS Big Sur Essential Training

Organize items on the desktop - macOS Tutorial

From the course: macOS Big Sur Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Organize items on the desktop

“

- [Instructor] Let's look at how you can store files directly on the desktop and how you can get things cleaned up when you have too much stuff on the desktop. To understand this, I'll start by going into finder and I want to go to the desktop folder, which is part of your home folder. So, you could go to your main system drive, to the user's folder, to your home folder where you will find a folder called desktop or you're probably just going to want to use the shortcut on the left to go directly to the desktop folder. Except for any storage drives you see on the desktop, everything else on the desktop is actually stored in this folder. I just don't have anything there yet. So, you could save something directly to the desktop or you could copy or move files to this desktop folder. So, for example, I'm going to go to the documents folder where I do have some stuff and maybe I want to drag this tax files folder to the desktop and you see it will be moved there or let me go to another folder where I have a lot more files and I actually want to select all of these files, so I'll go to the edit menu, I'll choose select all. This time, instead of dragging them to the desktop, I'm going to drag them to the shortcut for the desktop folder. And you see they have been moved to the desktop. Of course, I see them on the desktop, but if I go to the desktop folder, I see them there as well. The contents of the desktop folder are the same as the contents of the desktop itself. Okay, let me close this window. So, you can see you can store things directly on the desktop, but I think it's important that you don't store too much stuff directly on the desktop, but if you do have a lot of stuff there, I want to make sure that you can at least keep it organized. Now first, you can drag files individually and manually organize them, but that can be pretty tedious. Fortunately, you have some quick options for organization. First, I want you to make sure you click somewhere on the desktop itself just to make sure the desktop is active and it's easier if you don't have any other windows open. Then go to the view menu and I want to look at the options for sorting and clean up. Let's start with sort by and then I just need to choose some criteria. So, I'm going to choose to sort these by kind. So, now everything is cleanly organized and you'll see that all of the folders will be together, all of the Excel spreadsheets will be together, all of the word documents will be together and so on. Now, if you try to move something while sorting is turned on, it's not going to let you do it. It's just going to snap back into position, but of course you can go back to the view menu, back to sort by and choose none and then everything moves back to where it was and you can move things around manually. Another option back in the view menu is clean up. So, I'm going to choose clean up by name. Now, it looks pretty much the same, everything is sorted in a much more clean fashion. This time they're alphabetical by the file name, but when you choose clean up, you still have the option to move these manually if you want to. Now, naturally you could go back to the view menu, back to clean up by and choose some other criteria. So, maybe I want to sort them by the date they were created and it will quickly clean them up that way. All right, one last option I want to look at is stacks. So, I'll go to the view menu and I'm going to click this option to use stacks and now everything is organized by file type with one icon representing each type of file. Now, these are not folders. Nothing has been moved on my hard drive, it's just a sorting tool. If I click on one of these stacks, it opens up and I can see all of the files in that stack. From here, I can work with these files normally. I can open them up, I can move them around, but when I click back on the name of that stack, it closes to keep things more clean. By default, stacks are grouped by file types, which I think makes the most sense but we can always go back to the view menu, go to group stacks by and choose some other criteria. So, maybe I want to sort them by the date they were created. So, now I have fewer stacks and they're organized by when those files were created or naturally you can turn stacks off. So, go back to the view menu, click use stacks again to turn that feature off and we're back where we were. Stacks and sorting tools can make a big mess of files on the desktop much easier to browse. With that in mind, I still recommend that you do not store a lot of stuff on the desktop. It is better to use other folders on your storage drive for better organization.

Contents