From the course: Computer Literacy for Mac (2018)

Using your desktop - Mac OS Tutorial

From the course: Computer Literacy for Mac (2018)

Using your desktop

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- [Instructor] Now let's talk about the word desktop. This word already came up once at the beginning of this course, but in reference to the type of computer you may be using, as in a laptop or a desktop computer. But that's not the only use of the word desktop when it comes to computer terminology. Another meaning of desktop refers to what we're seeing on screen right now. This vast empty blue area. You may have a different color or a photo as your desktop background, also called a wallpaper, but this area is known as the desktop. Now the desktop in reality is just another folder on your computer. It just happens to be the folder you see most often, and it's always open unless it's completely covered by another window. But if you can see a tiny portion of your desktop, you can drag files out of other folders on to the desktop to move them there. And the desktop can be a very convenient place to store commonly used files or even recently downloaded files. For example, I'm going to open up a program called TextEdit which comes on every Mac and it's found in your applications folder. I've added it to my dock here for convenience sake. And we'll get into opening and using applications in a later chapter, but for now I just need to run an application to demonstrate how to use the desktop. So here I'm going to click the new document button, and in this blank document that opens I'm just going to start typing. (typing) So I've started putting together a to-do list, and I'll probably continue adding to it throughout the next few days, so I want to make sure it's stored in a convenience place. I'm going to choose file, save, and a dialogue box opens prompting me to name my file and choose a location on my computer to save it. I'll call this to-do. And notice one of my choices here, in the where menu, is desktop. I'll leave that selected and I'll click save. And notice that a file called to-do immediately appears on my desktop. This is the file I just saved. So if I close this to-do list, I can open it again by double clicking its icon. So that's a quick example of using the desktop to keep a file. Now as I previously said, the desktop really is just another folder in your home folder. In fact, if I clicked to open the home folder I added to the dock earlier, you'll see that one of the folders in here is the desktop. Now if I open it open, sure enough there's my to-do list file. So again if I have this closed, and I just go to my home folder to my desktop folder and click from here, I can open up the file again. Now the desktop is a very convenience place to store files that you frequently use, but many people just use it as sort of a dumping ground for all kinds of files they've accumulated, and they rarely go through and clean it up. But having a really cluttered computer desktop is a lot like when your real desk is cluttered. It can become very difficult to find things and work efficiently. And when it comes to your computer desktop, having tons of files on it really can slow down your computer's performance. So it's a good idea to occasionally look through all the files on your desktop and figure out if you still need to keep them there or if you can move them into one of the other folders in your home folder or even if you can just throw them in your Finder's trashcan, which we'll look at how to do in another movie.

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