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  PPC > Computing Guides > Windows  

Use Windows’ folders to make finding your files easier.

David Dorn shows you how to organise your files so that you never lose anything ever again!

If you use a word processor, or a spreadsheet – or just about any other kind of program in which you create documents or files – the files you create will need to be saved onto your hard disk.

Most programs offer you a “default” folder in which to save your work, but it’s not always obvious just where that folder is on your hard disk, and sometimes, when you want to open up a piece of work to do some more work on it, you can’t always find it.

Windows 95, Windows 98, SE, Me and all the rest of them, offer a simple solution to the problem. They both create folders called “My Documents”, in which you can store all your files. (By the same token, they also create a folder called “Program Files” in which all your programs should be stored. In theory, every program for Windows that you buy should use the “Program Files” folder to install itself into, but many don’t – we’ll look at that another time).

The purpose of the “My Documents” folder is pretty much self explanatory. It’s meant to be the repository of all the files you create. One drawback of just using “My Documents” to hold all you work is that you can end up with lots and lots of files in there, and, even with the Windows icon system, it might not always be obvious what kind of file is what.

So, why not create some folders in the My Documents folder, with names that mean something to you?

For instance, in my own My Documents folder, I’ve got folders for different kinds of work. There’s a folder called “AOL” for every piece of correspondence I have with AOL. There’s another one called “PPC”, in which I store all the articles I’ve written for this magazine. You may want to create a folder called “Letters”, one called “Car” – the list is endless. All that matters is that you understand what each folder is for.

Then, when you come to save a piece of work, you simply click on “My Documents” then the folder that corresponds with the piece of work you’re saving, and then, most importantly, give the file a good name.

Windows 9x allows you to use what are called “long file names”, which simply means that you can use something a little more descriptive. For instance, if you’d written a document in Word that was all about Dinosaurs for a piece of homework in your History class, you might call the document “Dinosaur homework for history” and Word would put in the file extension “.doc” for you.

You might have created a “Homework” folder, of course, in which you had created a further folder called “Homework” in which case, you could simply call the file “Dinosaurs”, and save it into the Homework folder.

At the end of the day, if you create descriptive folders in the “my Documents” folder, you will find it much easier to find files that you have created – because they’ll be stored in places that you can remember. The only thing to watch out for is programs that do not automatically start the save process in the “My Documents” folder.

If you have such a program, then you will have to find your way to it yourself – just remember that “My Documents” is located on your C: drive. My tip: - create a shortcut to “My Documents” on your desktop!