Essential Digital Skills Level 1

111 videos, 7 hours and 55 minutes

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Deleting files on an Apple computer

Video 42 of 111
3 min 15 sec
English
English
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What we are going to do now is just have a quick look at how to delete a file on a Mac. What we see on the screen here, we are on the Finder on a Mac. This is where all your files are. So here we can just select down the left-hand side, desktop, documents, downloads, wherever you want. So what we are gonna do here, was just on the desktop. What we have got on here, some screenshots we want to delete. So, very easy to get rid of them. If you just want to do them one at a time, just click on them so that they light up, put two fingers down on the trackpad and then it will pop up with a sub-menu and look down the menu here, and it says Move to Bin. So we literally click on that, and we move it. And you will hear that clicking noise, which refers to the fact that it is been transferred across. And then if you want to see where it is, if you go down to the bin on the bottom right-hand side, you will see here, there is the file we have just deleted. So if you want to then delete multiple files, if you just hit the shift button you can push screenshot one there and I will delete all of these ones on the screen here. Again, just touch down onto the mouse pad and then delete them.

You get the noise to confirm it is been deleted and it is gone. Another file you might want to get rid of at any time are these files. Now, this file here is a Teams file. This is where we have downloaded a program onto the computer and it is left this file on the computer, and we need to get rid of it. So again, does not matter if it is a document or any other type of download file, we can delete those as well. So we can delete this Teams one here, and this other one just here, just by clicking both of them, touch down on the pad, move to the bin, and the file has been transferred across. Click onto the bin, we can see all the items there. Now, what we do not want to do is leave these in there for long periods of time because this is all going to take up space on your computer. So what you can do is delete everything in the bin, but you can also revert stuff back if you needed to. So if we wanted to put this file back in, this screenshot here, just click on it and you can then put it back.

So we hit this button here, it removes it from the bin, puts it back onto my desktop. You see the file has now appeared back on to the desktop, so we will just delete that again. Go down to the bin, and if you want to just empty everything in the bin, we can hit this button at the top, Empty, or you can just select some files. So if we wanted to just select some of the files, we can send those... Just completely delete them. But what we will do now is to show you how to completely empty all the files. Click on the empty button, you just confirm it, empty bin. Now, those files have gone and the bin is completely empty. So if we look back on the bin, there are absolutely no files in there. Now, once we have emptied the bin on the computer here, those files have gone. You cannot recover them so always be careful. If you do not need to delete them straight away, you can leave them there but remember that they are there and you will need to delete them at some point. If you do delete any confidential files on your computer, you need to also, if you want to get them completely off the computer, delete them out of the bin as well otherwise someone could just look into your bin and see the files, put them back on the screen, and then access them again.