Windows XP My Documents Folders

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Gerard Mainardi. Today we're talking about how to organize your My Documents in Windows XP. Remember, Windows XP is a trademark of the Microsoft Corporation, and I am not affiliated with the Microsoft Corporation. Now, to get to your My Documents, all you have to do is go up to your start bar, hit the start button, and you'll see right there (among a few other things, like My Computer, maybe My Pictures and My Music), will just be your general My Documents folder. You click that to open that up. Your My Documents folder will probably look something like this. We want to get to a better view where we can really tell what's going on. This is something that most computer users don't understand at first. What you want to do is right click, pull up this menu here, go to View, and go to Details. This will bring us to the most detailed view of everything that we can find. Now up here you'll notice things like the name of your folders or files, file sizes, and the types. Below, it would say different things, depending on what kind of file it is. We also want to get two more crucial pieces of information that are very helpful to have. To do that, right click up on this top bar here. This is a list of all the different things that you can see about your file types. You can see the owner, author, title, things like comments. For your MP3s, you have things like the artist, the album title, the year--everything here. What we want to turn on are the first three things: the name, the size, the type. We also want to turn on Date Modified and Date Created. These are simple pieces of information about your files that can be used to much better organize them. Another thing that you might not know: if you click on the bars up here, you can sort your files in order--that--ascending or descending, shown up top. For instance, if we want to do Date Modified, here we're looking at them ascending; here we're looking at them descending. If we want to look at size, click on Size once ascending, again descending. I find it easiest to keep them in name order, but for various things we'll be doing, these could be helpful ways to sort your files. Now that we have a view that we like, what we want to do is set this to be applied to all the folders that we look at. Let's go up here. Go to Tools, and go down to Folder Options. Now over here in View, open this up and hit 'apply to all folders.' Say 'yes'. This way you will see the same view that we see here, in all the folders that we're looking at. This makes it a lot easier to do. Say 'ok'. You may have to close and reopen My Documents for this to take effect, but hopefully it'll take effect right now. If it doesn't work, close it, reopen it, you're ready to go."