Creators not Consumers

Just as in a filing cabinet you do not want all your files to be in the same Folder, so just dumping files on your computer into My Documents is eventually going to turn into an unusable mess. Creating Folders and sub-folders is a way to keep things orderly and tidy and make retrieval easy.

In the example above, aup is a business that has to bill clients for work done. In order to keep track of Bills sent and payment received, there is a sub-folder to aup called 'Billing' and two further sub-folders called 'Sent' and 'Payment received'. Just dumping all the relevant documents into a Folder called aup would be very confusing. Using sub-folders helps keep different categories of documents separate and easy to find. The Billing sub-folder would not be used to save anything into directly, documents would be saved into the one of the two sub-folders off Billing.

What system you use and what you call the folders and sub-folders is entirely up to you. The following is just another example of Folders and sub-folders. The 'letters to Katie' folder might well contain no files, all the files going into either the Sent or Received subfolders. However if you are in the process of writing a letter you may want to save it in 'Letters to Katie' until it is sent and then move it to the 'Sent' sub-folder. I will cover 'copying' and 'moving' files later.

Creating Folders and Subfolders

I am going to cover two methods for creating Folders and Subfolders. The first method uses Windows Explorer, and the second uses the 'Save' or 'Save as' box that comes up when you click 'File', 'Save' or 'File', 'Save as' in any given program.

Using Windows Explorer.

Open Windows Explorer. If you do not yet have a Folder called 'My documents', give one click with your left mouse button (left click) on C: so that it is highlighted. 

Click 'File' and in the pop-up menu move to the 'New' option, you do not need to click it, a new menu will appear, on this menu left click 'Folder'.

In the right window pane a new folder will appear with the words 'New Folder' highlighted. You can now type the name of the new folder, in this case, 'My Documents'. Click 'Return' or 'Enter' to confirm your typing. If you inadvertently clicked somewhere else and the Folder name is confirmed as 'New Folder', right click the folder and choose 'Rename'.

To add further Folders and subfolders to 'My Documents', highlight (select) the Folder or subfolder you want to add a new folder to with a single left click of your mouse and click 'File', 'New', 'Folder'.