Find That File!

Introduction

Using computer applications is one thing. Managing the file on the computer is another thing entirely! Has this ever happened to you? You spend an hour typing a letter of other type of document in Microsoft Word. You close Word, responding to the prompts to name and save the file. A week later you want to pull up the document and make some changes but you can't find it! Where did it go????@@@!!!

 

Well, the computer did not eat the file and no one maliciously came along and deleted it. It is exactly where you put it. You just don't know where that secret place is. Sounds like you need a simple lesson on File Management.

 

File Management 

Think of your computer as a great big file cabinet. If you are connected to a network, then think of the network as many more file cabinets. Whenever you save a file, you have to think about which drawer in which cabinet you are going to store it in. Likewise, when you want to retrieve a file, you have to know what file cabinet to go to and which drawer to look in.

filecab.jpg filedrawer.jpg

Let's suppose you want to save the file on your personal computer. the most likely and usually the default location would be My documents. Now, you have to name your file. Name it "letter1" and since it is a Word file, it will automatically be assigned the .doc file extension. Thus, the complete path to this file is now my documents\letter1.doc

To retrieve your file later, from your computer desktop, double click on the My Documents icon:

mydocuments.jpg

Look for and double click on the file named letter1.doc

letter1.jpg

Alternativly, you could open Microsoft Word,

  1. Click File
  2. Click Open
  3. Click My documents
  4. Click letter1.doc

letter1b.jpg

 

Going Deeper

Suppose you have a lot of files. It makes sense to create folders to organize your files logically. If you write a lot of letters, it might make sense to create a folder in My Documents named "Letters" to hold all of your letters. To create a folder named letters within the My Documents folder,

  1. Double click on the My Documents icon on your desktop to open the folder
  2. Right-click on any white space in the folder
  3. Click on New
  4. Click on Folder
  5. Type "leters"

lettersfolder.jpg

 

So, now if you saved your document letters1.doc in the letters folder, the path would be:

My Documents\letters\letters1.doc 

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