Use folder shortcuts

- [Narrator] Let's start this video with a question. Do you know how I can get to the documents folder in Finder? Well if you watch some of the other movies in this course, you may know that I can open up Finder, I can go to the "Go" menu, and open up the "Computer" in Finder, then I can go to the main system drive, go to the Users folder, then to my Home folder, then to the Documents folder. Pretty easy right? Well maybe, maybe not. I do think it's very important to know the full path to the folders that you use, but come on, let's be realistic.

On a day to day basis, you need something faster than that. And that's what shortcuts are for. On the side bar, on the left side in finder, you should see this Favorites category. Now when you point at Favorites, you'll see this button pops up so that you can hide or show the contents of Favorites. I want to make sure that all of the contents are visible here. And here in these favorites are shortcuts to important folders that you may want to use. This shortcut to Applications takes me to the Applications folder which is where all of my programs are stored.

If I click on Documents, it takes me to my Documents folder. If you have the path bar visable down here at the bottom of the window, you can see the full path of how to get here. But, those shortcuts make things much quicker. What about the Music folder, or the Pictures folder? I don't see shortcuts to those. Well you can and probably should set up your own shortcuts. For that we can go into preferences. So in the main finder menu, up here at the top, I'll go to "Preferences".

Then I want to go to this tab for the sidebar. And we can see that Favorites category we were talking about here. And we can see each of the shortcuts are listed here. And there are a few that are not currently enabled. So if there are any of these that you do want shortcuts to, you can just come here and enable those options. Now below that, is the Locations section, where you can also choose to show a shortcut to your computer's root, or to your built in drives. So, go ahead and enable the shortcuts that you want. I want to enable all of the optional shortcuts here in the Favorites category.

And then I can close this Finder. And now in addition to a shortcut to my Documents, I also have shortcuts to my Pictures, or my Music folder, or my Movies folder. I even have a shortcut directly to the home folder itself. So now I have all of those shortcuts in the sidebar. But what about other folders? The folders that you make yourself? Well if I go to My Documents, and I go into my Client Projects folder, these are folders that I created or moved here. And let's go to this Globe Bank folder.

Let's say this is a folder for a project that I'm going to be working on a lot this month. Wouldn't it be nice to have a shortcut to this specific folder over on the sidebar as well? Well, you can set that, and here's how. You can click and hold down on that folder and drag it, and I'm not gonna let go until I tell you, because there's something important to see here. I can move it over to the sidebar, but if I were to drop it here for example, it would move that folder to the Movies folder. That's not what I want to do. What you want to do is move until you see this line in between or below one of the existing shortcuts.

Then you can let go, and now you have a shortcut to that folder over here on the sidebar. So when I want to go to my Documents, I can click on that shortcut. But when I want to go specifically to the Globe Bank folder, I can click on that and it takes me straight to that folder. And if you want to remove a shortcut later, that's really easy too. Just right click on it, and choose "Remove from Sidebar". And now that shortcut has been removed. I have not deleted that folder, I have just removed the shortcut to it.

So getting work done efficiently often means getting to things quickly. I encourage you to understand how folders are organized on your computer, but you should still probably use shortcuts on a regular basis, just to keep things moving quickly.