Understanding Folders

The Folder Concept

There are usually various paper records that are stored in a home. There may be paid and unpaid bills of various types, copies of wills and deeds, medical records, tax records, maintainence records, report cards, and more.

One method of storing all this is to put all of it in one pile. When you want to find something, you start at the top and look through it until you find what you're looking for.

Another method is to get a filing cabinet, dividers, and folders. The top drawer may be divided into areas for bills, taxes, and medical. The second drawer may be divided into areas for legal, auto, and appliances. The area for bills in the top drawer may have folders labeled: Unpaid Bills, Paid Bills, and Bank Statements. The area for taxes may have folders labeled: 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998 .... This takes a little work and thought to set up, but you can find what you want much faster. If you want to tell someone else to get something for you, you need to tell them where to find it. You may say: Open the top drawer of the filing cabinet, look for the Taxes divider, open the 1999 folder, and bring me my state tax return.

You can use both of these methods to store programs and data on a computer.

Some people store all of their programs and data in one area of their hard disk. Suppose you use this method. If you look through the listing of the contents of your hard disk long enough, you may be able to identify the files you named yourself. However, many programs create data files that the programs name themselves. Also, many programs are composed of many componets. Suppose that you decide to add a copy of the Wowwrite word processor to your hard disk and delete your Zipwrite word processor. Is ZW2.OVL part of Zipwrite or part of your Zapworks spreadsheet?

A better way is to use a method similar to our filing cabinet example above. You can create folders on your disk drives. By using folders, you can group related files together instead of having them scattered all over your disk drives. You can put folders inside of folders. The folder on each drive that contains all of your other folders on that drive is called the root folder

DOS and versions of Windows prior to Windows 95 use the term directory instead of folder. They call a directory inside a directory a subdirectory. The Macintosh OS, OS/2, and Windows 95 use the term folder. We will use the term folder here. Just remember that folders and directories are the same thing.

Suppose you use the Wowwrite word processor and write letters for business, school, and personal use. You may create a folder to hold all the files that come with Wowwrite and a letters folder to hold folders called business, school, and personal. The business folder will hold your business letters, the school folder will hold your school letters, etc. A diagram of your folders would look like this:

                              _________|_________
                             |                   |
                          Letters             Wowwrite
                    _________|_________
                   |         |         |
                Business   School   Personal

Paths

Internet Paths