File Management Tutorial

Salomé -

Informations

• Publié par: Choon
• Nombre de lectures: 10
• Langue: English

Extrait

Save Move and Find Files

Terms to be familiar with in this section are:

Location

and

Path

.

Think of

Location

as the question: Where is it? Or Where did I put it?

The next term is

Path

.

The "address," or where a file lives, is called a path.

So

the question becomes: How do I get there?

Here are some examples of Paths:

The illustration above show the same path structure located in different Drive locations.

The

Path

then is made up of a Drive location followed by a series of Folders and Sub-

Folders.

The folders and Sub-folders are delimited or separated by slash

(\)

.

Below is an image of what a fully qualified

PATH

name to a file location looks like.

Saving a Document

There is no great mystery about saving documents.

A document will go wherever you

put it.

However, if you don't pay attention, it's likely to end up where you least expect it.

Another thing to remember is: Where did I save the file?

A few tips about saving documents:

1. What

drive

is it on?

You can save it anywhere, all you have to tell the computer

where you want it.

a. The hard drive inside the computer

b. An external drive(like the more recent USB Flash Drive)

c. A remote or network drive located in a file server.

(Your personal network

drive or your department shared drive.

2. What

folder

is it in?

Once you've chosen the drive, you must then select the

folder.

You can put it in any folder you want.

3. What is the

name of the file

?

You can call it anything you like, but take in

account some of the following recommendations.

a. Use meaningful names.

b. File extensions are attached to the file name with a dot, and dots can be

placed within the file name.

For example:

letters to friends.pat.sue.sam.

doc

is a valid name, and the .

doc

is treated

as the extension, because it comes at the end.

c. The valid characters in a Windows file/folder name are:

A-Z, a-z, 0-9, _, space, character

d. NOT valid characters in a Windows file/folder name are:

! @ # $ % & ( ) ' ` - { } ~ + , ; = [ ]

e. Although you can have up to 64 characters in a file name try to keep it to

less than 32 characters including extension.

4. What is the

extension

?

Normally the extension is automatically given by the

program or application that creates the file.

Files created with Microsoft Office

2003 will have the following default file extensions: Word defaults to

doc

, Excel

defaults to

xls

, and so on.

Moving and Copying a File

There will be times when you need to change the location of a file.

You may want to copy it from one folder to another on a drive, or

You may want to copy it from one drive to another drive, or

You may simply want to move it to another location without making another copy.

Moving and copying files from one place to another is relatively simple.

However, a few

warnings are in order:

If you are copying from location to another, watch out for the size of your files.

Always

verify the available space or capacity of the areas you will be copying or moving file to.

Especially once you get into multimedia files like images, sound or video.

You may

have a serious problem since these files tend to be enormous (especially sound and

video).

This is also true of PowerPoint presentation and slide show files.

Moving vs. Copying

Moving

a file means just that:

you have one a file that you remove from one location

and place in another.

You start out with one copy of a file and you end up with one

copy of the file in a different place.

When you drag and drop a file from one folder to

another folder

on the same drive

, you are moving it.

This is the same action as when

you perform a cut and paste option.

Copying

a file means that you make a second copy of the same file and store it in a

different location.

You start out with one copy of a file and end up with two, each in a

different location.

When you drag and drop a file

from one drive to another drive

, you

are copying it.

This is the same action as when you perform a copy and paste option.

Retrieving a File

Retrieving a file can be simple.

When you saved the file you know how and where you

saved it.

Think of it as the same process in reverse.

Let's assume that yesterday you

saved a file named "test.doc".

Today, you want to go back and add to it.

So instead of

creating a new file you will

OPEN an existing file.

When someone else saves the file, say in a shared department drive, the person who

saved the file needs to tell you the path to the file in order for you to retrieve it.

When we try to open a file, a dialogue box will open up.

This box is asking us what file

we want to work on.

We have to choose the file.

In order to choose it, we will have to

follow the same steps we followed when we saved it:

What drive is the file on?

What folder is it in?

What is the name of the file?

Finding a File

Finding a file document can be quite simple IF you remember where you put it in the

first place.

However, you will come across conditions like the following:

You keep a couple of hundred files to look through.

Maybe the file management is not very helpful as far as how to group the types

of information.

You have to look for a file that was created say a year ago.

You may have inherited files in a folder and sub-folder structure created by

another person other than yourself.

Then there is the case when you just cannot remember where you filed it.

No matter the situation, you need some method for retrieving files when you can't

remember where you or someone else put it.

You could always open up and look in

each and every folder on your local drive or every remote network drive available to you

until you find it.

This is not too efficient.

However, here is a better way to search for a files.

Click on

Start

, then

Search

, then

For Files or Folders…

Select the option

All files and folders

You will then see a search dialog screen

You can search by Filename or by a Word / Phrase contained in a file in any drive

location you choose.

See the illustrations in the pages that follow.