Essential Digital Skills Level 1

111 videos, 7 hours and 55 minutes

Course Content

Window file explorer

Video 75 of 111
9 min 45 sec
English
English
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In this film, we are going to look at the Windows File Explorer and what this is is a way of navigating all the files and folders on your computer. So it is quite easy to get the Explorer to come up, just literally hit the Windows button, which is to the left of the space bar and the E button at the same time. When you hit that, the window will pop up. From here, you can navigate and see all the files and folders on your computer. So if we just look here, at the top here is the frequent folders, so you can easily access things like your desktop or your downloads and documents. Lower down, you can see the recent files, so as you see down here, the very first file here is EDSQ test and this is just the test that we did before making this film. What we can also do is find out that information about that, so if you right mouse click while it is hovered, see this there is a blue line, if we just go, so it is hovered right over the item we want to find that information about, hit the right mouse button and then we get a menu pop-up.

And from here we can do different things. If it is a video file, we want to play it, we can do that, we can share it with other people, we can open it with different programs. This was "open up on this Windows machine with a default player" but you can change the player if you wanted to. We can send that file on to somebody, we can transfer it through Bluetooth, we can compress the file and we can make a desktop shortcut. So this would actually put this file on the desktop of the computer so that you can access it really quickly. You can also do things like mail it to somebody or burn it onto a DVD, or save it. You can also copy the file, as by copying the file, it makes an exact copy of it and then we can paste that somewhere else. Shortcut, we have spoken about, but what I'm going to look at here is the Properties. So if we click Properties and what this will do is it will tell you information about this file that we are dealing with.

So it is an MP4 file, it is a ".mp4" which is the extension for a movie file. You can see it opens with Films and TV which is this the default player on the system, but we can change this by just hitting this change button and select another program if we wanted to use a different player. We can see exactly where it is stored and with this, if you just have a look on there, it says C: /Users/Diana/Downloads, that's just saying that is where the file is, so it is in Diana's downloads folder. We can see the size of the file, this particular file, is 4.11 megabytes and if you see here, it tells you how many bytes it is as well, so it is 4,317,094 bytes. It also shows how much size is used on the disk, which is exactly the same, it tells you when it was created, so the exact date and time it was created, any times it was modified, so if we modified the file at any point in time, that shows as well and the last time we have accessed it.

So that was the key information, but there is more information here if you want it. The security just shows the people who are physically using it and the permissions that are actually allowed to use it, we have got the details file here, you can write it, you can give star rating if you wanted for the file by just clicking along here and it just has other general information, which is a little bit more advanced stuff, I would not worry too much about it, but have a look at some files and you can see a lot of the information which is held about the file, so it is surprising how much information is actually listed here. And also previous versions. In this example here, there is no previous version, so most of what you are going to be doing is going on to the general setting and from there, you can find out the key information. And one of the key parts we are after is the physical file size, which is this information here 4.11.

If you do make any changes, you do need to hit the Apply button to actually apply those changes and then if you want to just get out of it and don't make any change, just hit the cancel and that window will then disappear. So that's the recent files. You can drag this bar down the side if you want to go lower, or you can control it on your mouse and you can see all the files there that are classified as recent ones. So on the left-hand side here, we got the Desktop and that shows anything on the desktop. But we will have a look here on the download, so here is the Downloads folder, so everything down here is listed, what files and folders are on the desktop itself. We have then got the Documents and similar to what we have covered before in other videos, here will be all the pictures, so if you got any photos stored on the computer, they will all be listed.

Shared folders, here are some other folders that you would have, these are just some work ones we got on here, so Pro-trainings, diners, labeling, we have got separate. And then lower down there's some other drives, so on the left here, you will see it says One Drive. Now, this is a cloud-based system, which is linked in with or and by Microsoft, so it is the easiest way of storing data within Windows computers because it comes with Microsoft Office. Then lower down, it tells you information about this particular PC and if you see there there is this down arrow, if you click on that, it can shrink all that up, so it keeps it tidy. So if you do not want to show all that information, you do not have to, so you could just leave it as a quick access files at the top, or you can hit the button here and it will expand back to this computer.

So along here, we have got things like the Desktop and Documents and Downloads, but also where music is stored, where videos are stored and then the main C drive is the main drive of the computer and if there was any secondary drives as well, they would be listed here. So if you are working with a USB stick or something like that, or an external drive, you will see them listed. Now, as you look down here, you will see some of these are different drives, this is because this computer is linked in with a network, so if you see a work computer, you will often see some other things down there. So they have got the red X there because where we are filming now, we are disconnected from our work network, so therefore it will come up with an X on there. So also lower down, we have got the Network settings. And from here, if you just click on that, it will take a few seconds to load, but then when it loads, it will tell you what actually networks are available.

So here, we have got the main network we are on and this is the television we are physically watching this screen on right now. So it tells you what the media device is or what monitors you are working with and also the computer itself. Again you see here, that's popped open here, if you hit this little V, that will switch that off and if we go back up here, we can make that smaller and make it a lot more easy to read, if you want to. Now, if you need more room, you can literally hover the mouse over this bar here, until you get the double-ended arrow and you can slide that along and give you a bit more room. So if some of your folders that you are working with have got long names to them and need a bit more room, you can adjust the settings on that just as easily. Along the top of file explorer are some other things, so you can copy and paste directly from the top here.

So if we were to take this EDSQ test film here, we can hit the button here and we can actually copy it, as well as using the right mouse click, we can paste it to another location. We can cut it, which will remove it from where it's stored now and then when we use the paste, it will put it in to the new location. Also along here, we can move, copy, we can delete things as well, we can rename them, we can make new folders for stuff and also see the properties directly from the menu at the top. It's just another way around of accessing the information that you need. So if we just click on it now and we say we want to rename that file, we can name... This is EDSQ test and we just put a new name.

And then we hit the return button that will save it and then that is now put in as the new name. That's by using the icon at the top, but you can just as easily right mouse click over it, this will come up and then we can say rename the file, hit the rename and it's popped up and it's there. And the other way is to just click slowly twice on it and then the file will come up and we can rename that that way as well. So if we want to completely rename this one, we can delete that name and we can do it, just call it test two, hit return button or just click off the screen and it's changed the file name. So there's different ways of actually renaming folders and files.

It may well be that you have got your downloads, so we just go on to the downloads here. So we are in the downloads folder and we want to create a new folder, so for that, we can hover over the new folder icon, which you can use shortcut keys, which is control, shift and end if you want to, so it's just by holding those three buttons down together, it will pop up, if not just hit the new folder and then it comes up and we are just going to call this EDSQ folder and then we can save that. And then if we just look down here, we can take a file if we want to, click on it, drag it to that highlight and move it into another folder.

So what I was doing there, is taking the mouse over the item we want to take, hold the left-hand mouse button, drag it down, see the bar, it's moving, see where it's going and then put it into that folder and it's dropped. So if I now click on the folder, you will see the two films that were there and again, if you want to, you can right mouse click on those and get all the information that you want directly from here. So we have looked at the file explorer and this is very similar to what we have looked in the other video on how to use the Mac, they work in the same way. The important thing is, is to keep your files as tidy as possible, because the tidier you keep your files and in folders where you know where to find them, the better it is and the easier it is to view or to find information and also not lose something.

Learning Outcomes:
  • EDSQ Unit 3 LO 3.1