From the course: Working with Computers and Devices

Organize files and folders in Windows 10

From the course: Working with Computers and Devices

Organize files and folders in Windows 10

- [Illustrator] One of the most important concepts to understand when working with computers is the system for organizing, storing, and locating your files and applications. In this context, the term file, it refers to a single item, such as a word processing document, a photo, a video clip, a song and so on. Applications are the programs that run on your computer, which often use, interact with, or create the files stored on your computer. Another term you'll frequently hear is folder. A folder is sometimes referred to as a directory, but I think folder makes more sense because it's easy to understand the concept of storing files within folders. Again, we're using the Windows 10 operating system here for these examples, but the concept recovering applied to other operating systems as well. Here in Windows 10, I'm going to click the file Explorer icon, and that opens up a new window where we can navigate and explore the contents of the computer. But in this case, let's say I want to create a new folder to store some of my business documents. Now in each account, you already have some folders created, which you can see over here in the left sidebar. Let's click documents, which is a good place to start my business documents. You can see I already have a couple of files and folders inside the documents folder, but to stay organized, I'm going to create a new folder for my business-related documents. There are a couple of ways to do this, but for this example, I'll click the home tab, here at the top of the window and then select new folder. And there it is. By default, it's called New folder, but notice the name is highlighted. Meaning if I start typing while the text is selected, I can give it a more meaningful name. I'll call this folder business and I'll press enter. So there's my new folder. I can open it by double-clicking it. And as you'd expect, it's currently empty because we just created it. Now, just like how there are several ways to create a new folder, there are several ways to add files to that folder. For example, if I were working in Microsoft Excel on a spreadsheet, I could save that spreadsheet and choose to store it in this folder. Alternately, I can click the home tab again, click the new item menu, and here I'll find options for several types of files I can create. So for example, I want to create a text document. So I'll select that option, and that instantly generates a new text document inside this folder. Just like when we created this folder, the generic name of this new text document is highlighted, so I can give it a better name. Now, if you don't start typing and you click outside that name, you'll see that the highlight around the text is removed. I can still rename this file though. I just need to click it once to select it, pause for a second and then click it again. And you can see the name highlights again. The reason for pausing between clicks is that if you click twice too quickly, that's considered a Double-Click which opens the item instead of highlighting its name. So let's say I want to use this document to keep some ideas for a book I'm working on. I'll call this Book Ideas and I'll press return. And now if I want to start working on this file, I can double-click it, which opens it in the default text editing application. And I can start typing out some of my ideas when I close this file, I'm prompted to save it so I don't lose my changes. I'll click save. And now I've created, edited and saved a text document. But now that I think about it, this doesn't really belong in this business folder. Instead, I want to store this in a folder for my book ideas. So I'll click the back button to go back to the main document folder, and here I'll create a new folder for my book ideas. Another way to create a new folder is to right-click within the folder and then choose new folder. There it is and I'll call this books. Now, I need to move that book ideas document I created in the business folder into the books folder. Again, there are multiple ways to do this. For this example, let's go back into the business folder where that file currently is, and now select it by clicking it once, and I'll go to the home tab and here I'll choose move to. This gives me a list of folders on my computer that I may want to move this file to, but I don't see that new books folder I just created. So I'll browse for that folder by selecting choose location. This lets me navigate my entire computer to locate the folder I need. I'll start by opening up my user folder. Here I'll find documents and within documents, here's that new book's folder I created. I'll select that and I'll choose move. And just like that, the file disappears out of the business folder. And if I go back to the main documents folder and look in books, there's the text file. Now, another way to move files is to simply drag them where you want them to be. For example, if I want this file stored in my main documents folder, I can simply click and hold down on my mouse button and then drag it to the document folder listing here on the sidebar. It says move to documents I'll release my mouse button, and if I go back to the documents folder, which I can do by clicking on documents up here this time, you'll see book ideas is now sitting here in the main folder. But of course it really does make more sense to leave it in the new book's folder here. So I'll drag it back in like so. Now, if you no longer need a file, you can always just delete it. If I want to get rid of this Book Ideas file, I can just select it, and then under the home tab I can choose delete, and it's gone. Deleting files sends them to the recycle bin on your desktop, which I can double-click to open. And there it is. So you don't have to worry about accidentally deleting files. If you made a mistake or you went to undelete a file, you can just find it in the recycle bin. As long as you haven't emptied the recycle bin, which does permanently delete your files and then just drag the file to place it back into its folder or anywhere else you want to store it. So if I move this window slightly out of the way, I can grab book ideas and drag it back into the books folder. So that's how to create new folders and files and how to move, delete, and recover those files.

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