Folders: Computer Tupperware

Written by Larry Schneider
Thursday, 05 January 2012 01:00

Dear Larry,

What exactly is a folder?

— M.L.

Dear M.L.,

A hard drive is in essence an oversized filing cabinet, and it helps if you think of a folder as a drawer in this electronic filing cabinet. If you buy a real four-drawer filing cabinet, you can expect that until its dying days, that filing cabinet will contain four drawers. On the contrary, a hard drive is intended to be a filing cabinet whose drawers may be reshaped by its owner many times over.

Drawers or folders in a hard drive are meant to be nested like wooden Russian dolls. Open the Tax “drawer” in a hard drive, and you might find multiple drawers inside, one for each tax year. Peer inside a folder labeled Word Processing, and you might see more folders — perhaps one for letters, another for memos, and still another for chicken recipes.

The word “file” is the generic term for each of our word processing documents, each of our Excel spreadsheets, and everything else that’s tucked away inside our hard drive filing cabinet. Every folder inside our hard drives may contain any number of these files as well as any number of additional folders. Each one of these folders may contain more folders and more files. For example, this column is saved in a Word file that resides in a folder I’ve named “Greenwich Post.” And that folder is one of many folders I’ve created inside my “Accent on Computers” folder, which is one of many that can be found in my “Documents” folder.

My computer is itself a folder that contains icons representing your disk drives as well as icons for the Windows Control Panel and other objects. And the Recycle Bin is a folder that contains the items you’ve deleted.

You may create a folder directly on your Windows desktop by clicking any part of the desktop with your right mouse button (don’t right-click an icon on your desktop — just right-click the background), then left-click on “New,” then “Folder.” A yellow folder icon should appear where you first right-clicked — type in a name for this new folder, and press Enter. If you want to create a new folder inside an existing folder, it works the same way — first, open the existing folder (such as the “My Documents” folder), then right-click the background (the white space) of the folder window.

So you see, a folder is nothing more than a way to organize all the “stuff” in your computer. If you can stand one last analogy, your vegetable bin is one of many containers (folders) inside your refrigerator, which is one of many containers inside your kitchen, which is one of many rooms inside your house, which is... I hope you’re getting the idea. And just as you’ll never be able to completely identify all of the files and folders in your hard drive, neither will you identify all of the mysterious, semiorganic material tucked away in the back of your refrigerator.

Which reminds me — where did I leave that leftover chicken? This is Larry Schneider, logging off.

Larry Schneider is the owner of Accent on Computers, a Greenwich-based consulting firm catering to individuals, businesses and professional offices. PC and Mac services include computer setup, training, troubleshooting, virus resolution, networking, Internet, database and programming. Call 203-625-7575, visit Accentoncomputers.com, or send e-mail to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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