How to Organize Directories on Your Computer

Series Summary

Computers are complex machines built upon very simple principles. They perform arithmetical operations millions of times over to transform digital information moving at lightning speed into usable human data. A personal computer's job is to help a user create, manipulate, deliver, receive or delete media content. This is a simple, sterile definition that sounds uninteresting on the surface. Nevertheless, these fundamental functions mimic human ability in some surprising ways. Therefore, the computer is increasingly becoming an engine of the imagination, a platform for the digital life. In this free video series on basic computer skills and know-how, IT specialist Dave Andrews offers great tips for making the most of a home PC. Andrews covers managing hard drives, including partitioning and backing up data. He also has information for the media buff, walking a record collector through transferring vinyl into a digital format. Andrews offers troubleshooting for Windows XP and Vista, and he even demonstrates using Microsoft Access and PowerPoint to the max!

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews, I'm going to show you how to organize directories on your computer. In Windows, it's very easy to get covered up on files. That's why you have a thing called a directory where you can organize files into groups. I have several directories created here, expenses, income, mortgage payments, pictures and more pictures. Those pictures, as you see, could easily be group into one directory called pictures that you would go into and access all of them at once. Expenses and income can be put under a budget folder. So I'm going to show you how to do that. To create a new folder, click on file, new and folder. And let's call it budget, press enter to save the name. We want expenses and income to fall under budget. So let's just grab these folders, hold the mouse button down and drag it into the budget folder. That folder disappeared because it's now under budget. A double click on budget to pull this up. To go back you could either hit back or press up. Let's do the same thing on income. Click on it, drag into budget. Income also disappeared. Mortgage payments fall under budget. Now, for these pictures, let's create a new folder called, folder. And as you can see here, I just right click and went to new and selected folder. That's another way you can access that. Let's call this one, pictures. Because I have so many at once, I want to move them all at once. So let's click vacation, hold down the control key on your keyboard, click on Hawaii and those that's selected it, click on Tennessee and those that's selected it. To move them all at once, just click on anyone of them and hold the mouse button down and then drag it into pictures. So now under pictures we have all three folders. As you can see Microsoft's directory management is a very easy to use. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how to manage directories with Microsoft."