How to Use Desktop Shortcuts for Quick Access to Files

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Michael Burton with michaelburtonfilms.org located in Salt Lake City, Utah and we're here talking about how to use Microsoft Windows. Now what I want to talk to you about is using shortcuts on your desktop to gain quick access to your files. Let me start off by saying that Windows XP is a registered trademark of Microsoft and I am in no way affiliated with Microsoft. This is a very simple technique to use and it helps a lot. For example, you can see on my desktop over here on the upper left that we already have a few shortcuts. One, I've got my Internet Explorer shortcut that allows me not to have to go into my start menu or to go into my programs menu and pull up Internet Explorer. I can just double click right on Internet Explorer from my desktop and it brings up my Internet Explorer. That's one example. Let's close that down. Another example are my shared folders icon which aren't really up and running right now, but that's for my network at home and when I double click on that it's a shortcut to my shared folders. Now if we want to create a shortcut - we can create a shortcut for any program or any file folder, anything that we wish. For example, let's take this test document here in Word that we have. Now if we want to create a shortcut to this because I'm going to store this in My Documents. So let's go ahead and open My Documents as well. Okay so here I have My Documents. I'm going to go ahead and I want to create a shortcut for this test document because I'm going to store Test Documents into the My Documents folder but I don't want to have to open up the My Documents folder in order to open my Test Document. So what we're going to do is right click on the Test Document icon, and down here at the bottom if you scroll down, it gives you the option to create shortcut. Let's create a shortcut. Now as you see over here on the left it has now posted a Shortcut to Test Document. Now, you don't have to leave - you can rename this Shortcut to Test Document anything you want, but you can tell that it's a shortcut because of the little arrow icon. These ones do not have arrow icons because they are programs. This - well, that doesn't necessarily mean anything either because some of the programs I have like my editing software contain arrows when we create a shortcut which I'll show you in just a sec. But the Test Document now has a shortcut so I can go ahead and now put my Test Document in my My Documents folder and I can close that down. Now if I want to open my Test Document all I have to do is open this shortcut and it automatically brings up my Test Document and I don't have to go into the My Documents folder and waste that time. It's just a quicker way to do things. You can have your entire desktop full of these icons. I have found that the more that I have on the desktop - and you can delete them again by just right clicking and clicking delete. I have found that the more that I have on my desktop, the more shortcuts I have and the more items I have on my desktop, the slower my computer runs. So I try to keep my desktop pretty cleaned up and not have a lot of especially big files such as video files and things like that and music stored on my desktop. But anyway that's how you create a shortcut. They come in very handy. If you want to create a shortcut for a program go to your start menu. First of all, go into your Programs and let's say we want to create one for Network Magic - this is my network software - so I'm going to right click on the icon and then click create shortcut. Now it'll create a shortcut right here in my folder and what I can do is take this and drag it to my desktop. Now you see the little arrow again on the icon? That means it's a shortcut directly to my Network Magic. So now all I have to do is double click on this and it'll open up my network at home."