Understanding Shortcuts & 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. Let’s talk about the difference between a shortcut and a file. A file will contain the actual data that you’re interested in. For instance, gardening. Let’s go ahead and open it. There is nothing in there right now. How to grow beautiful flowers. I’m going to close it. It’s going to ask me if I want to save it; I’ll say yes. If I open up this gardening file it has this data in it. Now, if I was to go ahead and right click and drag this down, and say create shortcut here, shortcut to gardening. This is a pointer to that file. Now what if I would’ve right clicked and dragged this down and said copy? Okay, it says copy of gardening; that’s great. We can see it’s a copy of it. Now, if I open all three of them, I have the data there. If I open this one, how to grow beautiful flowers. As you can see up here, this is the file that’s getting opened. We can see here if I open the copy of it, it’s the copy of one that is getting opened. This distinction becomes very important. When you go to delete files and update data in files. For instance, if I delete the shortcut to gardening, which I’ll go right here and do, the gardening file is still there. If I delete copy of gardening, that file is gone. When you delete a shortcut, it deletes just the shortcut not the file itself. The other place this becomes very important, let’s say for instance I want to go into financial, so I’m going to open that. I open up the financial and I have my home budget. I’m going to copy that to my desktop. I have a copy of it; exact same file name. If I believe this is a shortcut, and I open it up and start editing the data in it, what happens is it changes the data in this file, but not this file since this is in fact a copy. If I would have created a shortcut though…create shortcut…since this points to this file and opens it, it’s always changing the data in the single file. You could trick yourself if you think you created a shortcut but didn’t. Again, I can delete the shortcut without deleting the data."