Files - Hard Drive - Articles about Computing

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The concept of how a computer keeps your information can be confusing at first. This article may help.

When you prepare a document in a program such as Word or Excel or Access or PowerPoint or OpenOffice, that file is not located in the program. The program is the tool that is used to create it, but the file itself that results from it, the file that has your information or your database or your spreadsheet or your presentation, is located separately. Actually, it could be in any part of the computer. The programs that help you create or modify the file have their unique job and they usually do not change and do not include other things. That program is also used to read the file got you afterwards when you want to go back to it at a later date. The program helps you save the file itself, but the file is not inside the program. The file is separate.

That is why we have several articles here about organizing your hard drive. The program that is used to create the file is not going to move around, but the file itself can be moved around and it can be placed wherever you like in the hard drive and grouped together with any other files. Thus, you can keep all of the files that have to do with your home money management together in one location and it doesn't matter what kind of files they are. They might be word processing or presentation or database files. Once you have put them all together in the same location it is easy to locate them at a later date. All of your important files are grouped together in a way that it's convenient and accessible to you.

Many people like to group all of their programs, like Word or Excel or OpenOffice, in one location and then to make a number of other locations for each of the groups of files or sets of files that represent a different aspect of their lives. In this way everything becomes orderly on the hard drive and things can be located very easily when needed. Perhaps you might think of the program as a pencil and the file that is created as a piece of paper. That same pencil can be used to create one file, one piece of paper, one document, which can then go into a folder in one location. And then you take the pencil again and you create a different file and you put it into a different location, probably even in a different room or different building. The pencil in the file and the paper that are created are separate. The pencil has created a series of files which can then be scattered and moved from one location to another. They can be read when needed and filed away when not needed, and again brought up to be reread when needed another time. The pencil can be put into any location that you want, but it should be kept in a handy place where you can find it. The pages that are created, those documents, can also be put wherever you want them, and they should also be put into locations where they can be found easily so that you can work with them. You then take each page as you need it and you put it away when you don't need it and everything is convenient. You keep all of the pages having to do with a certain aspect of your life together in a certain folder, but that is irrelevant to the pencil which, as you remember, represents the program. It is irrelevant to the pencil that created it.