Files, Folders and Directories
Using your computer nowadays is fairly straight forward. With Windows and Mac OS you can do almost everything you want to do with your mouse. The thing is in the old days when you had to type at a command prompt you were forced to learn some stuff about filing systems.
When you use your word processor you will create a new document and then save it. Where will you save it ? In the first place that is given as an option ? That's great if you only have a few documents, what if you were creating several new documents everyday. If you were using a spread sheet where would you save it ? What is the difference between a spreadsheet document and a word processor document ?
Lets start at the beginning.
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Your computer has different places to store things. It may have a hard disk drive, a floppy disk drive, a CD Rom reader / writer. If you imagine your computer as a filing cabinet you can think of the these different storage devices as drawers in the cabinet. |
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If you open one
of the drawers you may find folders. Look at your disk and it will have folders ( also known as directories ). You can have as many folders as you want. You can have folders within folders, just like in a filing cabinet. Some of the folders are system folders, for example you may have "windows" folder or a "system" directory. These are created when the computer is set up. |
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If you open up a
folder, usually by clicking ( or double clicking ) on it
you will find files. In a filing cabinet these files would be pieces of paper, maybe photographs. In a very similar way there are different kinds of files on a computer. Consider the difference between a piece of paper with a letter written on it and a photograph, they are just different kinds of paper. We can consider files on the computer as different kinds of paper. |
Different kinds of files you will find on your computer and what they are
When you save files on to
your computer, the program ( e.g. word processor ) will use the
name that you give it and add an extension to the name. This
extension is used by the computer to find out what type of file
it is.
In just the same way as if we stored photograph slides in one of
our folders in the real filing cabinet we would have to know they
were film slides so that we could get the correct equipment to
view them.
The slides may be marked "Holiday Pics" but that would
not tell us how to view them.
It may be that the film slides have some text on them which says
, "35mm color photo slide - Use ViewMatic 110 or
compatible". Using this information we would know how to
look at the slide.
If we have a file on the computer called "Yearly
Account" we would know whether it was a spreadsheet file, a
word processor document or even a picture. This is when the
extension comes in. The extension will have been added by the
program which saved.
The format for the extension is as follows :
"name.ext" e.g. "Yearly Accounts.doc"
The extension is almost always 3 letters. To make it easier to understand you normally don't see these extensions. What you see is a description of the file. So for the above example you may see in your list :
Yearly Accounts ___________ Word Processor Document
How to Organise Your Files
Well I think I'll leave that up to you. Just make sure you know where things are !
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