Organizing Files in Microsoft Windows

Video Transcript

"Hi! I’m Ross. Thanks for visiting expertvillage.com. What can we do with computer files? Let’s find out. In this clip, we’ll talk about organizing your files. First start windows explorer, which I’m doing by clicking on Start, going up to My Computer, right clicking, and then with the left mouse button selecting Explorer. I’m going to expand My Documents by clicking on the plus sign. Next to it, there is the folders that currently exist below it. I’m going to click on My Documents to show the contents on the right hand side. As you can see, I have files that are sitting here, but they are not organized. As you continue to add files and create documents…If you just leave them all go to the default My Documents, this will grow to many, many pages. It would be best to organize into categories, just like you would do on file cabinet. You can see I have some business related documents here. I also have some personal related documents. I could start off simply by creating two folders; one called Business, one called Personal. I’ll do that right, clicking on an open space on the explorer site here and going down to New, and up to Folder left to select it. Business, right click again, go down to New and the Folder, and say Personal. Now, I can simply just start moving files into these groups. For instance, here it is Business. I’ll get these ones down here. Looks like the rest of these are personal. You can look at the clip on moving files to get details on how to move files. Now I have no documents sitting at the root of My Documents. I have some default folders that Windows includes like My Music, and My Pictures, but also I have some of these other ones. There is a financial one here. While in this financial folder, I may actually want to go ahead and include that one, since it’s personal, into my personal area. I can move this down here, and you see this plus sign by personal, I click it, that’s where financial is. Then again, I can go into personal here. I could say, well here is more financial stuff on budget, I’ll move that up there, and mortgage could go into the financial area. I could just leave it this way for now, and then add another folder if it seems like it is growing too big."