Because of a completely overwhelming response from my one fan, I’d like to review files and folders this issue. I know it seems pretty fundamental, but have you ever, say, downloaded a file from the Internet and then can’t find it? Or has someone sent you an email attachment and, after dragging it to the desktop, have you realized that there are twenty other files on the desktop, and it’s gotten overwhelming? Do you know what to do with these files? If you don’t, then read on.

We’re going to use Windows Explorer for the rest of this article. If you’re using something called File Manager, shame on you. If you are using Windows 95, Windows Explorer is fairly good. It has some quirks, but even with quirks it handles long file names. File Manager does not and should not be used.

Now, please don’t just sit on the couch and read this article. I’m writing it intending for you to be seated at your PC and actively following my instructions and to repeatedly do these instructions as an exercise until it becomes second nature. This is a foundation to understanding most of what goes on in your PC, so it’s important.

Windows 98 has an improved Explorer and is very configurable. It’s main improvement is that once you set the style of how it looks, it stays that way. The Windows 95 version doesn’t seem to remember much of anything. But there are a few things we must do here to make Windows 95/98 Explorer more useable. Open Explorer from its icon in the Start menu. This is the view that has a dual pane. The left pane has a directory tree diagram, and the right pane has a folder and file list. Go to the Menu, View, and click on Details. This gives you a pretty easy-to-read picture of the files in any directory. Browse to any directory on the left pane and see what files appear on the right. You’ll need to go to View, Options and set Explorer to use the same window for all directories to keep it from launching a new window for each directory. And you’ll have to click on View, Details sometimes to keep Explorer (95) behaving. While you’re at it, display the toolbar too. The most useful feature on the toolbar is the "up" button.

For those of you with Windows 98, try setting your Explorer as "custom" and "use windows classic desktop" and "open each folder in the same window". I’m wary of imposing my personal preferences on you here. I prefer a traditional view of a hard drive, so I’ll ask that for the purposes of this article, try it this way then experiment with the settings later.

So, we’ll just assume now that your own files are not organized. When I say "your own files", I mean attachments to e-mail from your Aunt Tilly; interesting pictures or recipes you’ve captured from web sites; A letter to Uncle Bus that you started in WordPad; a spreadsheet to calculate how much interest you paid on the old clunker .. that sort of thing. What about the digital pictures of the "Worlds Most Perfect Grandbaby" the kids have been sending you? Can you find them? So let’s organize your hard drive a bit.

Go to Explorers’ Left pane and expand (C:). To do this, click on the + in the box next to the "(C:)" to expand the drive if it’s not already expanded. If it’s already expanded it has a "-" in the box.

Select the (C:) ("Select" means click once so an object is highlighted), then on the menu, click on File, New, Folder. In the right pane, a "new folder" will appear, and is ready to be renamed from "new folder" to let’s say "Images". You’ll see that when it’s renamed it also will appear in the left pane, alphabetically under (C:). So let’s add a subfolder under that one. Select the folder "Images", then on the menu, select File, New, Folder. And rename it "Grandbaby". Add another one under Images called "Stuff from Internet". So here’s what it looks like in my Explorer.

Now that you have the idea, create a new one called "Downloads" under (C:) and also make sure you have a document directory. Since I have Microsoft Office, notice that I have a folder called "My Documents". Other word processors may or may not create a document directory for you. If not, then go ahead and do it now. If you look at my expanded "My Documents" directory in the next picture, you’ll see that I’ve categorized all my "stuff" into separate folders. So when I create a new document I always immediately do a "Save As" and select the correct directory or create a new one on the fly.

The best reason to organize in this way, besides being "organized", is that you’re also making it much easier to back up your important files.

So now, what are we going to do with all that "stuff" you’ve been accumulating in the root directory and on your desktop? We’re going to move it all and get it organized. You can move all your files, one at a time or as groups. You can open two Windows Explorers if you like, one to move files from and one to move files to. You can size these so that you can see them both. Locate the files you want and drag each one to the destination folder. Using the right mouse key to click and drag gives you the most flexibility. When you "select" a file (or files) they become highlighted. Select them using the right mouse, drag them to the other window and when you drop the file, you get a small pop-up menu.

The item that is highlighted on the pop-up is the current "default" action. It’s best to go ahead and select the action you want. Our objective here is to relocate a file, so Move Here is appropriate. So navigate through the hard drive using the left pane of one Windows Explorer and select the files on the right. Find the destination folder in the other Windows Explorer, drag each file to its destination folder with the right mouse and when you drop it, select Move.

You can easily select more than one file at a time and move files as groups. The trick here is to get them all highlighted and then ,when you have them all, right click on the icon of one of the files in the group and drag it where it’s to go, just like moving one file. When you’re ready to drag the group, it’s easy to mess it up if you aren’t careful to select a file icon from the group. You may need to practice this a bit.

Now to select multiple files, just click on the first file in the group, hold down Ctrl and then left click on another, and each one in turn until you have them all. If you want to select a contiguous group of files you can select the first of a list, then hold down Shift, and select the Last of the group. All files between those clicks will be selected. If you wanted to then exclude one of them you can de-select using Ctrl + mouse click. You can add or subtract any number of files in this way.

If you have multiple files on your desktop and want to drag them to a folder, you can drag a rectangle over any number of files and all within that rectangle will be selected. You can add or subtract from that group using Ctrl + mouse clicks. When you’re ready to drag, remember to grab it by one of the icons in the group, otherwise you lose all the selections you’ve made.

There are other ways to move or copy files. For instance, if you look at the left pane of Windows Explorer, at the top will be a "Desktop" icon. Select that and on the right you’ll see an organized view of all the files on your desktop. You can also right click on any file and get the long file menu – the one ending in properties. In the middle of that menu you’ll see Cut and Copy. If you’ll select Copy, and then navigate to another folder, and right click in that folder, you’ll see that the menu has changed. It now has Paste, Paste Shortcut and Undo Delete. In this case select Paste, and the file you selected earlier will be copied to the new folder. If you had originally selected Cut from the menu when you selected the file in its originating location, the file would have been moved. That’s because the Cut -then- Paste operation is the same as move, and the Copy-then-Paste operation is the same as Copy.