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Lesson 1
Introduction To Drives, Folders & Files

Aarrgh!

If you took the quiz in a previous issue of our newsletter (also available from the Home page of this web site), you may have discovered or confirmed that your computer skills needed improvement. The reality of life in the law office is that there's not much idle time available for such pursuits. Most of your time is spent getting what needs to be done—done.

Our goal in this issue is to bring you up to speed on some computing basics. In this article we'll introduce you to drives, folders and files. What they are, where they are, and what you can and can't do with them. Of the three, files are probably the items with which users have the most direct contact. In law offices, files are usually word processing files and usually a single file would equate to a single document, i.e., a separation agreement. The next sections of this article will attempt to define and explain these three topics and their relationship to one another with an eventual focus on files.

Drives, Files & Folders

Your word processing files are stored on your hard drive. The hard drive is a magnetic recording device much like music cassette tapes and VHS movie tapes. From a law office standpoint, you really don't need to know much more than that about drives—after all, we're not trying to teach you how to repair them!

As a 90-minute cassette tape can hold a bunch of songs, a computer's hard drive can hold a bunch of files. Here's where the hard drive distinguishes itself. Where a cassette tape holds one or two dozen songs, and a VHS tape contains one movie, it's not unusual for a computer's hard drive to have 100,000 files! Heck, just the Temporary Internet File folder can easily have 30,000 undeleted temporary files in it!

Windows Explorer

Our main question in this article will be—how many files do you have on your computer? It's a good question, because to answer it, you need to use Windows' most basic and valuable utility—Windows Explorer (hereinafter referred to as Explorer and not to be confused with Internet Explorer). Let's start it up. Here are three ways you can start Explorer. (1) Double-click the My Computer icon, then double click the C: drive icon—this will give you a single pane view; (2) Right click the Start button and select Explore—this will start Explorer in the Start Menu; or (3) Find Windows Explorer on the Start menu—usually Start|Programs|Windows Explorer. On some Windows versions, it's at Start|Programs|Accessories|Windows Explorer.

We prefer the last of the three methods. By selecting Explorer from the Start menu, it starts with an exploded view of the C drive and gives you a two-pane view—folder hierarchy to the left, individual folder contents to the right. By the way, don't be confused by terminology—all the following are pretty much synonymous: hard drive, C drive, root directory, C: and C:\. The geeks may be smiling and thinking that a hard drive can be partitioned, and therefore, the hard drive may be the C AND the D drives. You probably never gave the issue much thought and that's why you're normal and they're not. In the unforgettable words of whoever—don't sweat the small stuff. You can consider our list of terms as synonyms.

Again, don't get Windows Explorer confused with Internet Explorer. While they are similar in many ways, Internet Explorer is for browsing the Internet and Windows Explorer is for browsing your hard drive. When we refer to Explorer in this article, we mean Windows Explorer.

Navigation

Back to the original question—how many files are on your computer? Step 1 is start Explorer. If you use method 3, you should see your screen divided vertically in two. The left side shows the hierarchy of folders; the right side shows you the contents of whatever is selected on the left side. In later versions of Windows, Explorer may start in My Documents or My Computer. If Explorer doesn't start with C: highlighted on the left side, navigate to it by clicking on the plus sign in front of My Computer, and then clicking on the C: icon. The plus/minus buttons simply expand or collapse the contents of the item to the right of the button. Once you understand the system, you'll find it works quite well. The basic navigational premise is—click on the left side to open a folder; see the contents of that selected folder to the right. The file and folder analogy should be readily comprehensible to law offices. Think of folders as, well—folders, and files as documents. What's neat about computer folders is that they may contain other folders. If you find the file/folder analogy breaking down a bit, it may be easier to think of the folders as a root system that starts from the "root" and branches off in every direction.

An example might help. There's a special Windows folder called StartUp. It's special because any shortcut that's placed in the Startup folder will automatically begin to run when you start your computer. A law office that uses Word might put a shortcut to Word in the StartUp folder so that when they turn on the computer at the beginning of the work day, not only will the computer start, but so will their word processor. It's a nice convenience. Our navigational exercise is to find the StartUp folder. The answer is:

Desktop
My Computer
C Drive (C:)
Windows
Start Menu
Programs
StartUp

If you have Windows XP or 2000, you'll find the StartUp menu in a different location:

Many users aren't aware of the StartUp folder because Microsoft buried it pretty deep. In other words, StartUp is a folder that is in a folder called Programs. The Programs folder is in a folder called Start Menu which, in turn, is in a folder called Windows. The Windows folder is located in the root directory of the hard drive. It's no big deal, just folders within folders.

While we're on the subject of the C:\ drive, you probably noticed the Desktop and My Computer items as part of the heirarchy. There's not much you need to know about them. The Desktop is essentially the screen you see when you start your computer (it's actually a folder that's located somewhere on your hard drive, but we won't get into that now), and My Computer is your computer. These items are arbitrary extensions of the hierarchy made by Microsoft to simplify the user's access to the computer and peripherals.

Follow the Path

This brings us to the next term that needs to be understood: The path or pathlist. You can think of a computer file name as being made up of three parts: the name, the extension (the part of the name after the period that usually designates a file type, i.e., doc for Word), and the path (that's the location where the file is on your hard drive). If you stored a Word file in the My Documents folder of the C drive, its proper name would be:

C:\My Documents\My File.doc

In this example, the file name is My File, the file extension is doc, and the pathlist is C:\My Documents\. Note that on later versions of Windows, the My Documents folder is located at C:\Documents and Settings\User Name\My Documents\. Again, we're seeing a folder within a folder within a folder. This is very common on today's computer hard drives, so try hard to understand the concept of the pathlist. It is essential.

Now back to how many files are on your hard drive. Start Explorer, click on and highlight the C: icon on the left side of the screen. The right side displays the contents of the C drive. Click anywhere on the right side and press <CTRL><A> to select every file and folder. Finally, right click on any of the highlighted files/folders and select Properties. Sit back and watch the total number of files and folders get tallied near the top of the Properties dialog. That's the answer to our initial inquiry.

If you clicked on the Properties item too quickly, you may have missed the other commands that are available on the right-click menu: open, send to, cut, copy, delete and rename. Some commands act on only one file or folder; others act on groups. You should be able to see the potential in the highlight and right-click technique.

If you were able to do everything in this article correctly, you're cookin'! If you're a novice, you just graduated from computer illiterate to rank amateur.

Here's some extra credit work. Find the StartUp folder and snoop out what's there. The programs you find are the programs that are starting up automatically every time you turn on Windows. You may be surprised at what you find. We'll continue with this subject in the next issue, so stay tuned.

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