Working with Files and Folders

I'm going to show you a few ways that I like to interact with these files and folders, and I'm going to do it in a real quick way. The reason is that many of you are probably already familiar with working with files and folders, but I think there's still some value to this, because if you pick up a couple of tricks that can really save you a lot of time down the road, it could be worthwhile.

Creating files and folders

I'm on my demo laptop and I'm going to open up this test folder right here. Within here I can right-click on it and just say new folder and create a new folder, and so maybe this one is test two, or whatever we want to call this. There we have it.

I can do the same thing actually with a file. I can create a new text file — and I do this a lot — and type in whatever the file name is, so I can call this file two, and there you have it. So that's just a quick way to create new files and folders.

Now, my options increase as I install more programs. For instance, if I install Microsoft Word on here, I could actually create a Word document. So it allows me to create more documents depending on what programs I have installed on here.

Selecting

The other thing that I'm going to show you is a few ways I could select things. I can drag out a selection box, and whatever falls into this box I can then select, so I can select multiple items using this selection box.

There are other ways as well. For instance, the shift key: if I click on the first item that I want to select, hold down the shift key, and click the last item, it will select everything in between. Versus the control key: if I select something, hold down control and then select something else, it will select something that's not in a range. So the shift key can select a range, versus the control key can select individual files — or, if I've got them all selected, the control key can deselect something.

Alternatively, I also have this menu item here that will allow me to select all, none, or invert the selection. The invert selection can be really handy if you're working with a large number of files. Let me show you in the Sysinternals folder. I can select something, or maybe it's a few things, maybe it's even a range, and then go to the invert selection, and then it inverts that selection, so everything that I just had selected now is deselected and everything else is selected.

Moving files

Now let's say I want to move these two files into test two. What I can do in this scenario right here is just highlight these two folders right here, drag them into test two, and now it will go into test two. Oops, maybe I didn't want that. I can do Ctrl+Z to undo that, and now it's back here in the regular test folder.

Now let's say I'm going to move these two files back into test two, but maybe I did that a few days ago and now I want to move it back into the test folder. One thing that's nice about this is I can actually move these files between windows. So if I want to drag it back into this folder, I can just drag it over here into this folder, and now it's back in this test folder. So I can drag between these windows.

I can even drag between different programs. For instance, I can drag text sometimes off of a browser into other types of files. It just depends on what type of programs you're using, and you can do a lot of dragging between these different devices.

If I wanted to open up this folder too, I could open up this folder. Let me get into test two here, and then I'm going to open up a copy of this folder. I can have them side by side, and now I can drag between these in this way as well.

Another thing that I could do is I could actually use the navigation here on the left hand side to navigate to wherever this file's at. So this is on the C drive, under Users, under the demo user, and under the desktop, and we see this folder structure over here, that we can drag to and from these different locations. So those are a couple of different ways that we can move things around.

Copying files

Let's say I didn't want to just move this, but I actually wanted to create a copy of it. There are several different ways that I could do that.

What I'm going to do is select these two folders right here and drag them into test two, but while I do this I'm going to hold down the control key, and by holding down the control key I create a copy of these. So that's one way to do it.

Or what I could do is drag it over using the right mouse button. Now I get an option: do I want to copy here, do I want to move here? And then I can create a copy. So that's another way of doing this.

Or what I also can do is just select these two files, hit Ctrl+C, come over here and then hit Ctrl+V, and then it's pasted in there as well.

The other thing I could also do is, with these two files selected, hit the cut button or the copy button. In this case I'm just going to do copy, and then I can paste it over here using the buttons, and then there they are right there.

Let's say I want to remove this — I can just hit delete.

Cut versus copy

The cut is something that — there's something called the clipboard. So when I copy something, it goes into the clipboard and I can paste it somewhere else. The cut does the same thing, it copies it into the clipboard so I can paste it somewhere else, but the cut cuts it from the original spot. So you'll notice that they stay there until I come over here and paste it over here, and then they disappear from the original location. So that's the cut versus copy.

Renaming

If I wanted to change the name of either of these files, I can do it a couple of different ways. Number one, I can just click on it, give it a second, and click specifically on the name of it, and by clicking the name of it then I can change this to whatever I want it to be.

The other thing too is I have a button up here I can click to change the name, or I could do a right-click. Use the cut, copy and paste buttons up here, the rename up here, the delete — so I can use the buttons here as well.

There are actually quite a few other ways that we can do those same things as well, but I just hit the highlights of the stuff that I like to use. Hopefully, working with those, you've picked up a couple of ways that you can be more efficient with the way you deal with files and folders. The method that I choose just depends on what I'm doing at that time, and so having all of these options actually can make you really proficient, because there are times when you do work a lot with these different files and folders.