Files and folders on an apple computer

What we will do now is look at managing folders and files on an Apple computer. Now, to look at where the folders are, you just go down to the bottom left of the screen, you go to Finder, you click that, then this window pops up. Now you can make this window bigger by just dragging the corners to make it fill the full screen up, so we just do that to fill the screen up. And this is where all the files are stored. So on the left-hand side, the first one there is AirDrop, which allows you to send the file to someone else with an Apple computer or it can also transfer the files over to mobile devices, tablets or phones as long as they are Apple machines. The next one is Dropbox, this is just another way of storing folders externally. We have also made some folders here for screenshots, so any screenshots we have taken on the computer are all in one place.

The "recent" folder is files that have been handled recently by the computer. So if you are not sure where something is, but you know you used it yesterday, it's highly likely you will be able to find it here, or if you literally just closed something down, you want to find it quickly, the "recent" is a really good one. Applications are the actual programs that are set on this machine. So here you see all the programs that are already loaded onto the machine and you can click on one of these and load that program up and start working with it. Down here is the desktop, this is the desktop where all the folders are as soon as you first turn the screen on and when you shrink down everything, so if we just shrink this down, the files that are here on the right-hand side are exactly the same as the ones on this desktop icon.

Documents is another way of storing information, it is just another folder held on your computer and we got the download section where anything that's downloaded from the internet or anywhere you have put it can stay in the download section. This is something which you can use as you see fit and people use it in different ways. So the downloads folder is where you download a folder from the internet or you have sent it in an email and then we store it on here, but the downloads folder is really where the folders are put, once you have downloaded from an email or off the internet. The purpose of this is really to move them onto your computer to where you actually want them. So maybe you move this file into a folder on your desktop or in the document section, but we do not want to do is have hundreds and hundreds of folders in your downloads. It just gets very messy and very difficult to manage. So try every now and then, look through the files in the downloads folder and then just move them across to the proper folder, wherever you want to store them.

The iCloud section is where data is backed up, I think with Apple computers, if you got the iCloud setting on there and you can have different sizes of data, amounts of data you can put on there, depending on what plan you are set on, the virtue of that is, is that your computer documents are all backed up. The only folder that's not backed up is the downloads folder, so it's important that if you are storing information, you get it out of that downloads folder onto either the desktop or onto the documents folder so that it backs up properly. Lower down here, these are just some programs we have downloaded recently and so here we show it's just a program we have downloaded off the internet, there's a little button here. This button means we can delete that. So if we just hit that, they will remove that from the file and this little button here, simply, if you have got an external drive on your computer before you disconnect it, you would disconnect it, so this is a program here and we can just disconnect that and that will remove that as well.

So following down the bottom, there are some tags and you can colour tags on folders and we will look a little bit more on how to do that now. So if we just go back on to the downloads folder. Now, along the top here, there are also some options you can do, so we can have them in little files like this, or we can change them to list format, or we can have a column, or we can have the folders here where it previews the actual image that's there. So we got the icons, I tend to leave the icons there because I find that easy to work with, but what you might think you need though is a little bit bigger or you can change the order. So if you click this button here, you can change the order of them, you can order them by name, you can also order them by the kind of application or the program they are, the date they were added, or you can do them by tags.

So these are just the ways that you can order the files, so it's often a good idea to at least set them by name and then they will always go in name order. So for example here, anything with numbers before comes first and then it works from A to Z. But if you just have one or none it can get quite random and if you delete files and that it can look a bit messy, so try and just set it on the name. This icon here, looks through and this will allow you to create new folders and open things and there are lots of different options down here. Now, you may well want to put stuff into a folder. So we can see along the top here, we have got six files and they are all PowerPoint folders, so what we could do is we could put those into a folder because we want to keep them separate. So what I could do here is just go on to this icon, click New Folder and I could just call it PowerPoint. So there's the folder, underneath it says there are no items in it and what I can do is just click on the first one, I can drag it into that folder and then it makes the noise, you see it has all moved along, or if I want to do multiple folders, I can click them in multiple and I can drag all of those folders and I can put them in. So if you just hover over it, see it suddenly changes colour, let go and all those PowerPoints are now inside that folder.

If you wanted to, if we just go back to all the folders there, you can also highlight all of the folders and then if you go onto the same button and it says New Folder with the selected items, so what I can do is create a new folder and I can put them all in there automatically. I can call it PowerPoints and they are there, so now all those PowerPoints are then tightly in the folder there. So that's different ways of filing stuff through, but what I normally do then is if I have got the PowerPoints folder and I do not want to really leave that in my downloads area, so I want to move that across to my desktop say. So you can just literally take hold of the folder, click on it, drag it across over the desktop, you see it has changed colour to blue, let go and it's there and then you can see the PowerPoints folders just here on the right-hand side.

So finally, I am just going to clarify what a file is and what a folder is. A file is an individual document, video, image or program and a folder is where they would go into. For example, we did there, we have got individual PowerPoint files and then we want to keep them all together, so we put them into a folder and then you can have folders within folders and you can sort things out so you could potentially have one folder which is all your personal stuff, one is all your work stuff, so within the work folder, you might have one folder that has got PowerPoints, one has got documents, one has got images and contracts. And then your private one you might have also some other bits and pieces and subdivide it up. So the file is an individual file and a folder is where you would store those to keep things nice and tidy and organised on your computer.