Creating and Renaming Folders

We've had a look at the program called Explorer before in the article Seeing what's on the computer.

It can be opened from the Desktop by clicking either of these two icons - obviously you won't have one called Burke, John but it may have your own name or your user name or on older computers may be called My Documents.

You can also open Explorer by holding the Windows key down with your thumb and tapping the E key with your finger. This can be a very useful thing to remember!

Let's start by going to the folder where we want to create the new folder. Once you are there, any content already in the folder should appear in the right hand window of Explorer.

There's almost always more than one way to do something but let's start with the one most people are familiar with - the File Menu.

In Windows Vista the default is for the menus to be invisible. If this is so you can still bring them up by holding the Alt key down with your thumb and tapping the first letter of the menu name with your finger. So for the File menu hold down Alt and tap F. You will see this written down as ALT-F. For the Edit menu you would ALT-E and so on. Remember that this tip will work in any software, not just Explorer.

Under the File menu click on New which will then open up a new window and then click Folder as shown.

But that's the hard way! And there are two other ways of doing the same thing!

You can move the mouse pointer to a white area in the folder where you want to create a sub-folder and right-click. Then choose New and then Folder as described above.

Or you could right-click in the left hand column on the folder name where you want your new folder creating and then choose New and then Folder.

Your new folder will appear like this with the folder name "New Folder highlighted for you to type a name for it. Note: you don't have to delete this as I've watched countless people do - just start typing and the existing text will disappear as you type the first letter of the new folder's name.

If you click the mouse anywhere else though the folder keeps its name of New Folder. You can still rename it - and any other folder - at any time as follows.

Click on the folder name to select the folder. Then you have a choice...

You can use the File menu again and choose Rename.

Or you can click on the folder once more and the name will be highlighted ready for over-typing. (Don't double-click though as this opens the folder - you have to click once to select it, pause and then click again to rename it)

Or you can press the F2 key which will highlight the folder name. This works on files too. Click once on any file or folder, press F2 and the name is highlighted for you to type a new name.

Note: if it's a file and you can see the extension (the dot and three-characters as in filename.doc or filename.exe) then whatever you do, make sure you leave the dot and the same three characters! Otherwise the file may not work.

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