From the course: macOS Big Sur Essential Training

Browse through folders - macOS Tutorial

From the course: macOS Big Sur Essential Training

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Browse through folders

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- [Instructor] Most people store documents, pictures, and other types of files on the storage drive on their computer like a filing cabinet that you might have in your office. Finder is the tool in macOS that lets you browse through those files and folders. If you see an icon for the Macintosh HD on your desktop, you could double click on that. Or you could go to the doc and locate the icon for Finder and click that. Either of those will open a Finder window. On the sidebar on the left, I can select a location, then on the right, I can navigate through the contents of that location. But I want to do some quick setup just to make sure that you are able to see some of the things on your screen that I have here. To do that, we'll go to the main Finder menu up at the top and choose preferences. In the general tab, we can decide which icons show up on the desktop. So if you have hard disks enabled, you will see your main system drive on your desktop. And if you have external disks enabled, you will see any external drives or USB memory sticks that you have connected to your computer also show up on the desktop. But we want to see those same things in the sidebar in the Finder window. So I'll go to the sidebar tab and make sure both hard disks and external disks are enabled here. So I can see them listed in the sidebar. And with that, you've got a few ways to get to your main system drive. You could double click on the icon on the desktop, or you could select it here in the sidebar in a Finder window. And this is a really good starting point. This is my main storage drive in my computer. All of the files you have stored on your computer will be in a folder somewhere on this drive. Unless, of course, you use an external hard drive for additional storage. Now we're not going to identify any specific folders quite yet. For now, I just want you to see that you can double click on a folder, which will open it up. And we can see the contents of that folder, which in this case is just more folders. It's very common to have folders inside of folders, inside of other folders and so on just like a physical filing cabinet in the real world. You'll notice that folders will be identified by this blue folder icon. Now, at this point, there is a chance that the layout of your Finder window looks a little different from mine. So I want you to look at the tool bar near the top, specifically at this cluster of four buttons. This will let you switch between the different views. So I can switch between the icon view, the list view, the column view or the gallery view. We're still in the same folder looking at the same stuff. These views just change how your files and folders are displayed. So if we go back to the list view, we get a little more information about your files and folders. And when you're in the list view, to open a folder, you can double click on it, or you could click this arrow to the left of the folder name that opens it up and it shows you the contents of that folder. You can click that arrow again to close it. Or if you're in the column view, when you select a folder, you'll see the contents of that folder to the right, and then you can select another folder and see the contents of that folder to the right, and so on. Of course, you can choose the view that you like, and you can switch that whenever you want. As you're navigating through your drive, eventually you will get to a folder that contains individual files like documents or pictures. This is generally what you want to be working with. You can see that these all have their own individual icons, which are different from that blue folder icon. And naturally the size and placement of those icons on the screen will change if you switch to a different view. As you're navigating through these folders, it's always important to know where you are. So I like to have the path bar visible. To get to that, I'm going to go to the view menu up at the top and I'll choose show path bar. Now I have this bar at the bottom of the window, which shows me which folder I'm currently looking at along with each preceding folder that got me to that point. And you can double click on any folder along that path to back up to the contents of that folder, and you can continue navigating around your drive from there. So let's pause here. For now, you should take a look around and start getting familiar with opening folders and navigating around in Finder.

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