How to Organize Computer Files

Video Transcript

"Hi Michael Burton with michaelburtonfilms.org located in Salt Lake City, Utah and we are here talking about how to use Microsoft Windows. From now on I want to talk to you about how to organize your computer files. There are many different ways to do this and the reason why this is important is because when you are searching for a file you need to keep organized and it is important to keep organized especially if you are running a business or you are trying to keep track of a multiple files at another place of business. It is very important to keep your files organized so I am going to show you a few tips on how to do that right now. Let me start off by saying that Windows XP is a registered trademark of Microsoft and I am in no way affiliated with Microsoft. There are a lot of ways to organize your files on your computer and I think that the easiest and simplest way to start out with is just to be efficient in labeling and naming your files and keeping them in separate folders. The more folders you create the better your stuff is going to be organized because you will be able to specify exactly what those folders are called. You can have folders within folders. You can label any of your files, anything you want. I tend to not even keep stuff on my desktop because as you can see it is pretty bare just because I love to file things so if you go into my start menu I have everything separated into folders and this actually isn't my everyday desktop I am only using it for this video but my regular desktop has everything organized here in my folder and under my documents and I have you know, 20 to 30 folders then I have subfolders you know built into these folders and so it is an unlimited potential as to how many folders I can create and what I can label things as. A few tips on how to label files, for example let's take this HD opener. If I want to rename a file, sorry one of the easiest ways to get your files to appear at the top of a list is to start them off with an AAA and then label it. Let's just say label file and that way you know if this is your most common used file or if you have certain folders within a ton of files that your most used files are always going to appear at the top and you are not going to have to scroll down every time where in this case it would be the L's to find your labeled file. It would automatically appear at the top all the time. Again the same goes for files that you don't want to appear too often you want them to always appear at the button and not necessarily in alphabetical order either. Because for example you can either choose to file your files in alphabetical order for example under here under my documents I can come down to this drop down list and I can choose to list or to use the details of my files and I always choose to list but if you want to do details this actually separates it up here into your name, the name of the file, the size, the type of file and the date modified. So you can actually click on date modified and have it modified by the date that the file is created. You can also do it by type and they'll put it basically in alphabetical order of the type. You can also choose to put it in alphabetical order of the name and that is why the AAA and the ZZZ is so important because for example if I put this in my documents and I click refresh it will automatically put my file at the top of the list of the files. Now if I had a folder and I wanted the folder to appear at the top of the folders it would be the AAA folder but that is a way to keep it on alphabetical order and to organize files that if there is ones that you want to appear at the top all the time just put an AAA before it. Another good way to label your folders or your files is let me pull this off of the desktop is to just be thorough. Dating them is very important, let's say just for example label file, let's do an underscore and then we'll put in the date today, let's see what is today. Today is the 21st of August so we are going to put you know 08_21st and that is going to be 2008 so by using underscores we can label our files and keep track of the dates and also separate words if we wanted to in those files. This is important because you can't use certain punctuation in saving files so to use an underscore to separate things is probably the easiest method to use."