Understanding files, folders, and directories - Mac OS Tutorial

- [Instructor] One of the most important concepts to understand when working with computers, is the system for organizing, storing, and locating your files and applications. In this context, the term file refers to a single item, such as a word processing document, a photo, a video clip, a song, and so on. Applications are the programs that you run on your computer, which often use, interact with, or create the files stored on your computer. Another term you'll frequently here, is folder. A folder is sometimes referred to as a directory, but I think folder makes more sense, because it's easy to understand the concept of storing files within folders. In fact, everything you interact with in your computer, is stored in a hierarchy of folders. You can have folders nested within other folders, and files stored throughout those nested folders. If it helps, you can think of your hard drive as one big master folder, or even a filing cabinet, where all the other folders are stored, accessed and arranged. Let's take a look at an example of a file and folder hierarchy. Let's say I have a folder on my computer called bills, which I have right here, in which I want to store scanned versions of all of my utility and credit card bills. I'm going to double-click this folder to open it, meaning I'm going to click it twice with my mouse. And inside this folder, you can see that I only have three files, but they're clearly labeled, water, heat, and electric, with the month's name in the file name. Now as I receive more bills, I could just continue to save them in this folder called bills, but as you can probably imagine, my folder would get pretty cluttered and disorganized fairly quickly. This is an example of when it's highly advantageous to create nested folders, or sub-folders. Here in Mac OS, I just click the gear icon at the top of the window, and choose new folder. That gives me a folder called untitled folder, and notice the name is already highlighted, meaning it's selected, and I can just start typing to rename this folder. I'll call it water. And I'll just quickly create two more new folders. I'll call this one heat, and third one will be electric. And now I've created three nested, or sub-folders, within my main bills folder. So with these sub-folders created, I can now easily organize my various bills, my dragging them into the appropriate folders. So obviously water will go into the water folder, heat will go into heat, and electric will go into the electric folder. If I wanted to, I could rearrange these, to clean up a little bit. I can even come up to the view menu and choose clean up. So if you understood that, you understand the essential principle behind the folders and file systems of your operating system. Now you don't absolutely have to organize your folders. Your computer can keep track of your files wherever you place them, but the question is whether you can. It's not hard when there are only three files to organize, but how about 300 or 3,000? Really, I'd say organizing your files is an essential skill and habit to get into. Now I also want to discuss the different ways you can view the files within a folder. Here in Mac OS, you have four buttons grouped together here at the top of the window. The first button represents icon view, which we're currently looking at. In this view, the contents of the folder are represented by these icons or small pictures. You have the ability to change the size of the icons, using the slider that appears in the lower right-hand corner. You can go really big, or really small. I like mine right about there. The second view is the list view. Now I prefer this view myself, because I can not only see the file names, but other information, like the date the item was last modified, its size and so on. We can also toggle open the folders to see their contents here. Next we have column view. And as you can see, this divides your window vertically. The advantage of this view, is that it allows you to see the path you follow to get to certain files. Notice I can click the water folder, and then the file inside of it, which ends with me seeing a preview of the file on the far right. And I can clearly see the folder or directory path I took to get here. Finally, we have the cover flow view. This splits your window horizontally, and displays each item in the folder as images you can browse through, either by dragging the scroll bar left and right, or by single-clicking the files in the lower pane. Just so you can see this if I go back to list view and click the back button here, and just go back into icon view here for a moment, and now go into my cover flow view of this folder, you can see I can scroll through here to browse the contents of this folder, or I can click them down here. Clicking to select any of these, allows me to add that file to the cover flow view as well. But it's completely your choice which view you prefer. It has absolutely no effect on the contents of the folders, only the way you look at them. Again, I like list view myself, because you can click on these headers to sort your list of files and folders. This can be especially useful if you want to, say, display all the most recently modified files in order. Or if you want to list them alphabetically, just click name. Clicking any header again reverses the order of the list. Alright, so that's an overview of the thinking behind the file and folder hierarchy, and the various ways you can view the contents of your folders.