From the course: Windows 10 Essential Training

Use shortcuts to essential folders

From the course: Windows 10 Essential Training

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Use shortcuts to essential folders

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- To find files or folders on your storage drive, you could go digging through a long path of folders, or you can use shortcuts instead. Here in File Explorer in the sidebar, on the left, there's this section, labeled Quick access. You can click on this arrow next to it, to open or close it. I want to make sure it's open. A few of the standard user folders like Documents, Desktop and the Pictures folders are here by default. So instead of going the long way, to access your Documents folder, you could just click on the Document shortcut right here, and that takes you straight to the contents of your Documents folder. These are links that go to important folders, inside of your Home folder. See you don't have to go digging in your Storage Drive, and find that folder the long way. But, if you use OneDrive, you might actually have, two Documents folders on your computer. To see that, I am going to go the long way. So I'll go to this PC, to the C drive, to the Users folder, then to the Home folder with my name on it. where of course, we will find the actual Desktop folder in Documents folder, and Pictures folder as well as several others. But since I do have OneDrive setup on this computer, I can see I also have a folder here, for OneDrive. And if I go into that, I find a second set of Desktop Documents and Pictures folders. Now you can decide, which of these folders you want to use. You can use the set inside of OneDrive, or just the set right here in the main Home folder. But here's the big question. When I click on the document shortcut, over in the sidebar, does that go to the Documents folder in my user folder? or the one in the OneDrive folder? it's important to know where these shortcuts are going. So here's what I want you to do, to confirm, which folder that shortcut points to. Just right click on the shortcut. In this menu, go to properties. And make sure you're in the General tab, and find this line labeled location. So I can see that this shortcut goes to my Documents folder, inside of my OneDrive folder. Now if this Documents shortcut, does not lead to the right Documents folder for you, there is a setting in OneDrive, that you can adjust. So let's just close this and we need to go into OneDrive settings, If you look at the taskbar, down here in the bottom right, you may see an icon for OneDrive. Or you might have to click this arrow here, to open up this sub-menu, and then I see the OneDrive icon right there. And that will be there, if you have OneDrive setup on your computer. So I can click on that to open up this OneDrive panel, click on more, to open up this menu, go to Settings, then we'll go to this Auto Save tab, then this button labeled, Update folders. And this is your key. If one or more of these three folders, are set to be protected by OneDrive, then those shortcuts in the sidebar, will lead to the version of that folder, on your OneDrive. They say these folders are protected, because everything you put in those folders, is stored on your system drive and is also automatically uploaded to OneDrive, essentially creating an instant backup. Now if you do not want your shortcuts, to go to the OneDrive folders, because you just want to use the standard folders, inside of the traditional location, inside of your user folder, then you can click stop protecting here. I'm not going to do that for now. I'm just going to close this. So these shortcuts here are very useful, but it's really important to know, where the shortcuts are leading to. So please check those Settings.

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