Windows XP More exercises with files

To maintain order in your documents, you need among other things to be able to copy, move and delete them. Here comes a number of small practical exercises in file handling.

Exercise folders

Now you need to create a couple of folders for your exercises. First create the folder C:\My Documents\x1.
1.    You need to select C:\My Documents in the folder window in Windows Explorer.
2.    Then select menu items Files à New à Folder.
3.    Now enter the folder name x1, and close with Enter.

4.    Now you can copy this folder. It must be selected in Windows Explorers right window:

5.    When the folder is selected, you need to press Control+c to make c copy (nothing happens on the screen).

6.    Then press Control+v to insert the copy. That gives this result:

7.    A new folder named ”copy of x1” has been created. It needs to be renamed. Press ArrowDown to select the copy. Press F2 to rename. Enter the new name x2, and close with Enter.
8.    Now the folder My Documents contains this:

9.    You are goin to ”play more” with these files and folders. But ceate also the folder C:\Tekster, which you can use for your permanent data.
10. Close Windows Explorer with Control+w.

About naming files

You can freely switch between upper and lower case letters both in your folders and in your documents (files). Actually it makes no difference to your pc, at least not as long as you work in Windows.
It only gains significance once you work with home pages and want your HTML files placed on a web-server. Many web-servers distinguish between upper and lower case letters. I that case it is easiest to stay exclusively with lower case letters – both for files and folders.

Move files

Now have you created the sub folder x1 in My Documents. The two text files need to be moved into that.
1.    Open Windows Explorer.
2.    Select the folder My Documents and select the file hallo1.txt.
3.    Hold the Control-key down, and then also select the file hallo2.txt.
4.    Now these two files need to be moved down into folder x1. You do that in this way. Press Control+x, which is the shortcut to cut. Notice that the file icons became faded:

5.    Select folder x1, and open it with either a doubleclick or with Enter. Then you get ”down” in folder x1, which is empty. Then right away press Control+v to paste.
6.    To paste means that the data, which are either copied (with Control+c) or cut (with Control+x), are inserted at the cursor’s position in the active window. Here it is the two files hallo1 and hallo2. They are moved down into folder x1.
7.    You just need to check that the files are gone from the root level in the folder My Documents. You need to go one level up from folder x1. So click on the button with the green arrow:

8.    You see that the two files are gone from the root level in the folder My Documents.
9.    Now you need to copy the two files from x1 to x2 yourself. Try if you can do that without using the mouse: Select the files in folder x1. Make copy with Control+c. Shift to folder x2, and insert the copy with Control+v. That should work like hand in glove!

Make your own copies

You need to make another folder, which will contain copies of the two files. The folder should be named x3.
1.    Find out for yourself which procedure you want to use. You can choose to create a folder x3 and then copy the two files into that.
2.    You can also choose to copy the whole folder x1 (or x2 for that matter) with contents. Then you just need to insert the copy in the root level of the folder My Documents and then rename the folder copy to x3.
3.    So get started!

Additional ways to move and copy

There are many ways to move and copy files. I personally prefer to use the keyboard as much as possible (that is the fastest) and with that the keyboard shortcuts Control+c, Control+x and Control+v.
But there are other methods, which can be good in certain situations:

With right click. You can right click on files and folders and then select copy or cut in the menu that opens.
Then you shift to another folder and select in the same way (with right click):

With menu options. If you don’t like to right click, you can perform the same operation, which I just described, with the menu bar in Windows Explorer. You just select the menu item Edit, where you can cut or copy:

With the mouse. The most difficult way to cut and copy is by using the mouse. Here you just need to drag files and folders from one position to another. It takes some practice to navigate between folders with a mouse cursor, which drags files along, but it can easily be done.
If you drag files from one folder to another, they will be moved. If you want to copy them, you need to drag the files and hold the Control-key down in the moment you release the files in the new folder.
You can watch the sequence by watching the mouse cursor that drags kind of a ”shadow copy” of the icons along. If you hold the Control-key down, you will see a plus symbol follow the cursor to indicate that copying is being performed.
In Figure 44 I am copying two files from folder x1 (as can be read in the address field) to folder x2 by mouse moves:

Figure 44. Two files are copied through use of mouse and the Control-key. Read the explanation in the section .

Navigation between folders

Since I am now demonstrating the various techniques, let us just look at the navigation possibilities in Windows Explorer. There you find buttons and keyboard shortcuts, which you might know from the browser Internet Explorer. On the Internet you navigate between various home pages, which you have visited before. On your pc you can navigate between folders:
One level up. You can always use the button with the green arrow to move up one level in the folder hierarchy. Another method is to press on the Backspace key, located above Escape.

Navigation forth and back. You can navigate forth and back between folders that you have visited earlier, by using the two buttons Back and Forward:

Alternately you can use the keyboard shortcuts Alt+ArrowRight and Alt+ArrowLeft.
Panel views. You have seen that Windows Explorer is divided in two windows. Normally you see a ”tree” in the left window, where folders and drives are shown. But you can choose from among a number of other panels, which are also known from Internet Explorer. They can be shown in the left window in stead of the folder view:

If you choose the Summary panel, you get a list with different days where you see which ”addresses” (files), you have visited:

Delete files

You need to be able to delete files and folders.
1.    Use Windows Explorer and select folder x3, which you have created earlier.
2.    Open the folder; there should be two text files in that.
3.    Start by selecting the file hallo1.txt.
4.    Theh press on the Del-key. Then you need to click on Yes in this dialog box:

5.    Notice that Windows XP asks if you want to send the file to the recycle bin. This really means that it is not permanently deleted, since it can be re-created. Try this:
6.    You use the regret function by pressing Control+z.
7.    The file will be ere-established in the folder, right? Now try to delete the same file. Select it and press Shift+Del. When you click Yes the file will be really deleted:

8.    Try regret that delete again. That is not possible.
9.    Now delete the whole folder x3., but use only the Del-key to send the contents to the recycle bin.
Comments: The Windows function Regret works in all user program­s (such as Paint, Word etc.), but you can also use it in Explorer to reverse a delete.
To maintain good order in your data, you need to delete all temporary files on an ongoing basis. Also delete duplicate files – you should never have more than one version of the same document on your pc.

Recycle Bin

You can also delete files and folders with Del in Explorer or another Windows program. But the files are really transferred to the recyle bin.
The deleted objects can be restored from the recycle bin as long as they are saved there (that depends among other things on how much space you set aside for the recycle bin). When files are deleted with Shift+Del, they can only be restored with special program­s.
The recycle bin is actually a system folder. You have access to the recycle bin in different places, among others in Windows Explorer, but it can also be opened directly from the desktop, where it has its own hyperlink (icon):

1.    Press Windows+d to see Windows desktop. Somewhere[n14]  there you see the Recycle Bin:

2.    Double click on recycle bin to open it.

3.    In the preceding exercise you deleted folder x3 with the Del-key. You can see that in the recycle bin. You can see where the file was located before, and the deletion date:

4.    In the left task window you see the options. You can empty the recycle bin (which deletes the contents permanently), or you kan restore its content:

5.    It is a good idea to empty the recycle bin routinely. When I did this exercise myself there were more than 500 MB data there; get them out of there.

6.    If you right click on the recycle bin on the desktop, you can choose Properties. Here you can set how much hard disk space the recycle bin may occupy. By default the recycle bin occupies up to 10% of of the space on each drive; that can soon be gigabytes on large hard disks, and that is probably too much.

Figure 45. Here you control the size of the recycle bin.

Make a HTML document

I will conclude this set of execises by letting you make an ultrasimple HTML document. So you need to make a real small home page!
1.    Open the Notepad program.
2.    Save the empty document immediately. It should be placed in the folder x1, and the file name should be homepage.htm. Notice that the name suffix is htm – that is what makes the document a home page.
3.    It should contain this text:

Welcome

It must be typed precisely as shown here including the smaller/greater than symbols as shown below. < and > are found between M and ? on the keyboard:

4.    Save the document again with Control+s.
5.    Then use Windows Explorer to open the folder x1.
6.    Notice the icon for homepage.htm, which now indicates that it is a HTML document. Then doubleclick on the file:

7.    Then Internet Explorer opens, and your tiny little home page appears in the browser window:

Figure 46. The HTML document is shown in the browser.
An explanation: You made a small text file in Notepad. It is saved with the htm suffix, and therefore Windows XP had registerede it as a HTML document (a home page).
The home page has a welcome text, which is surrounded by the two codes (so-called tags)

and

. The codes cause the text to be shown as a heading with a large and bold font. That is actually all you need to make a home page. You can get a course in that if you read my booklet ”HTML – teach yourself”.

Registering file types

HTML documents (than could be files with the htm suffix) are displayed by default in the program Internet Explorer when you double click on them.
Many file types are read by a specific program when you doubleclick on them (see Figure 30 on page 42). This ”behaviour” is a consequence of the file type registry, which I now will explain for you.
The following review is somewhat technical; you could skip it if you are a complete newbie.
1.    Use Windows Explorer and select Tools à Folder Options…
2.    Then open the tab File Types. Here it is determined how the types of the individual files (determined by the file ­name suffix) are registered.
3.    The file type name htm is opened with the program Internet Explorer, as seen in the bottom of Figure 47.

Figure 47. Here you see the file type registry for HTM files.
You can change the registry by clicking on the Shift button. You might want to open all HTM files with a different browser. Don’t start on that right now, unless you are experienced and know precisely what you are doing.

Choice of program for editing files

So HTM files are opened through Internet Explorer when you doubleclick on them. But if you right click on a HTM file (like in Windows Explorer), you get the option to edit the file:

Try that! The document is opened in whatever program is registered as your pc editor. If you have installed the program package on your pc it will typically be either Word or FrontPage.
If you want a specific editor activated to edit HTM files, it is done one the Filtypes tab in the dialog ­box Folder settings. There you need to click on the Advan­ced button. Then you can select the Edit function and click on the Edit file type button:

Figure 48. The advanced file type settings. Here you can indicate which program will be used for editing the particular format.
In the dialog box ”Edit file type” you can speccify which program will be used for editing. Here I selected my favorite editor NoteTab:

Figure 49. Here I specify which editor I will use as default to edit HTM files.

Registering graphics files

You might encounter a need to change the registering of graphics files. You might experience that some program you have installed so to speak takes possession of certain file formats. Then all file types of that program will be opened, which may not be what you wanted.
Try to find the JPG file type, which is used for digital photographs. Find it in the list, then you can see that JPG files are opened with the program Windows Picture- and faxviewer (see page 56). So you can change that – if there is a need for that!

Figure 50. The JPG file type is by default opened with the pro­gram Windows Picture- and faxviewer. You can easily change that.

Always show file names

A concluding detail in this review. It can be practical that certain file types (such as the different graphics file types) are always shown including their suffix – regardless of whether you have set that for all folders or not. You can choose that for the individual file type in the dialog box ”Edit file type”.

Figure 51. The check mark in the field ”Always show file type name” means that the GIF suffix is always shown in Windows Explorer mv. – regardless of other folder settings.

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