WINDOWS is organised like an office filing cabinet.

 Hard disc drives  (HDD) can be thought of as drawers.

You may only have one disc, which will always be listed as the C:/ drive

Sometimes you may have more than one HDD, or more likely someone will have set it up to be split into 2 or more partitions. In which case you may have a D:/ drive and even an E:/ drive.

Each drive is set up with a basic set of folders – such as Programs, My Documents, My Pictures.  Thus you will see an address such as C:/My Documents.

Inside each folder will be a list of files.  When Windows is set up or a new program installed, hundreds and maybe thousands of files will be created and you needn’t worry about them.

However, in folders such as My Documents, where you will find My Pictures, My Music, etc, it is helpful and important to organise a logical set of sub folders in which to save and store files so that you can find them again later.

For example My Documents might be sub-divided into folders named Family, Friends, Tax, Bank.  Thus when you write a letter in WORD you can save the file in the appropriate folder where you can easily reference it again later. Therefore you may have an address such as-

C:/My Documents/Tax/Request for refund Aug 2006.doc [note how it is also important to name a file with future reference in mind]

Ideally when you view My Documents, you should only see a list of sub folders, each of which will contain your files in a logical order. If you already have a list of mixed files, you can create some new folders and move the files into the newly created folders.  NB: We recommend using the right click options for Copy and Paste, or Cut and Paste  Remember to right click on the new folder and rename it to whatever is appropriate for your work.

We recommend you go to a Microsoft tutorial website which explains in detail how to work with folders. Especially scroll down to 'related links' for creating, moving and working with folders.