Teaching with Technology

Your computer organizes information using a hierarchical structure. This means when you save a file it is saved inside a folder, and that folder can be stored inside another folder. That's really all there is to file structuring–just folders inside folders–but you need to be aware of how this works to ensure that you can easily find files when you need them. 

You can think of your computer like a filing cabinet. You've probably never interacted with a filing cabinet, but it likely makes intuitive sense to you. You place pieces of paper inside a folder and have many folders arranged in drawers. On your computer, any files that you download or create will be inside a folder by default. An example of this is when you download a file it may automatically go to your Downloads folder, or if you save a Word file it may save to your Documents folder. Your Desktop is also its own folder. All three of these folders are likely inside a home folder. In the image above, your home folder would be the yellow folder and your Desktop, Documents, and Downloads folders would be the other three colors. 

These three folders are the most important for you to know about since they will be your most used.

The Documents folder is where many people keep the majority of their files. Inside it, you might want to create a folder for each of your classes, and you may go further and create subfolders within each class folder to organize your files.

Alternatively, you might prefer to be able to access things directly by clicking on your Desktop, so you may want to store files there. Any files or folders that are in your Desktop folder will appear visually on the Desktop screen.

Your Downloads folder will be the default destination location for anything you download. You can leave things in your Downloads folder and access them directly from there, or you can move them to a more organized location, like inside one of your class folders.  Sometimes you can set the folder location you'd like to download things to and other times you will have move things out of your Downloads folder and drag them to your Documents, for example.

What you prefer to do is up to you, but organizing things into folders and subfolders is the best practice. Storing files can be thought of similarly to storing your clothes: you can just keep everything in a basket and dig through it to find a specific shirt or you can separate items and store them in drawers. The latter method is better for computing and for having your socks match.

We live in a world where most interfaces we interact with are searchable by keyword. And it is true that you can search for files by name on your computer. So, if you can just do a keyword search to find a file, you may think “why wouldn’t I just keep everything all in one folder?”.

Perhaps the most practical answer why you should organize your files is that your professors will expect you to. For pre-Gen Z generations, file structuring is the norm and we feel a great sense of accomplishment if we have a tidy desktop and non-chaotic downloads folder. You may not gain as much satification from organizing your files, but if your professor asks you where you've stored a file on your computer, you'll want to be able to answer. 

But there are many reasons you should keep files organized:

• Folder structure is actually meaningful. Sometimes files will download together in a folder and must stay in the same folder to be properly accessed. If you accidentally move something to a different folder, even though you can search and find the file, you won’t be able to open it because it needs to be housed with its other files to be accessed. An example of this you may encounter at Reed is if you end up working with any files that produce maps. To properly render the map, you need to keep all its data files in the same folder.  
• Some programs are not capable of searching for files on their own. If you’re working in a coding language, like R or Python, and you’re trying to open a data file, you will have to explicitly tell the program where to go to find it by typing out the file path. 
• It speeds things up. If the computer is told to look in a particular folder for a file, it knows where to go instead of having to search through every single file on your hard drive. 
• Folders will help you find things too. Say you saved a document and you called it something like “draft”. Searching for “draft” might result in finding things like “final_draft”, “draft1”, or “draft_for_real”. First, you’ve done a bad job naming files. But second, you’ll have to open every file to know which one is correct, but if you had them sorted into folders like “Hum” or “Bio”, you would at least narrow your search. Having things sorted into folders also means you can have two files both called “draft” so long as they are each in their own folder. 
• If you’re working on shared files, say in Google Drive, it is often easier for your collaborators to find what they’re looking for if you have your files arranged in an orderly, nested fashion.

A file path is both the route you take to get to a file and the way your computer names files. A file’s real name isn’t just what you enter when you save the file. You’re essentially giving it a first name, but it also has a last name that includes every folder it is nested in. Here's an example:

File name (first name): “draft.docx”

Nested folders (last name):“User/doyleowl/Documents/Ornithology"

Full name: “User/doyleowl/Documents/Ornithology/draft.docx”

When we list the nested folders we list the outermost folder first and every subsequent folder is inside the preceeding folder. We use "/" to separate the folder names. In this example, our file is inside a folder called Ornithology, which is inside Documents, which is inside our username folder called doyleowl, which is inside the base folder User. To go back to the filing cabinet analogy, the User folder is like the room that all the filing cabinets are stored in. Unless you're doing major construction, you don't need to do anything on the room level. The folder for your username is like having your personal cabinet inside that room; in fact this folder is generally called your "home" folder. For most computing you are unlikely to need to use folders that are outside of your home folder. Because of this, the beginnings of file paths are always the same and then they become more variable as they get more specific. 

In the image at the top of this page, the file path for File1  would be "Yellow/Blue/File1" because the file is inside the blue folder which is inside the yellow folder. Full file paths end in an extension, which describes the type of file. If File1 is a Word document, the full path would be "Yellow/Blue/File1.docx", or if it is an Excel spreadsheet it would be "Yellow/Blue/File1.xlsx".

If you are referencing a file you will need to include the extension otherwise your computer will think you are looking for a folder. You can have files in same folder with the same name, so long as they have different extensions. For example, we could save the draft document as a PDF and it would create a new file whose full path would be “User/doyleowl/Documents/Ornithology/draft.pdf”. The extension for your file may not always be visible, sometimes you may just see "draft", but even if it isn't displayed the extension is always there and is included in the full path. 

If you are coding or using specific software, you will likely need to know a full path for your file. But more commonly what would be useful to you is just to know the general route you need to click through to get to your file. In your Documents folder, you might have files for each class you are in and inside those folders you may have folders for each week or each assignment. When you download any new files, you should move them to your organized folders so that you know the path to take to find the file even if you forgot what you named it. 

Working with Files

This guide will teach you how to open, rename, move, or delete a file. 

Guide for working with files: Mac

Guide for working with files: Windows

Finding Files

This guide will show you how to find a file on your computer even if you can't remember what folder it is in. 

Guide for finding files: Mac

Guide for finding files: Windows