Saving files

At Georgetown College, we have a series of computers that act as our campus network. These computers are not a great deal different than the computers on your desks, however, they are much more powerful. They have a great deal of disk space and they run a different operating system than you run on your pc. Otherwise, they are similar to your pc in many ways.

Each building on campus is wired with a connection to the network. In addition, each of your PCs is equipped with a network card that will allow you to connect to the network.

Each of our networked computers has a name. The name of the faculty staff network is called REBA. You can see this network by clicking on the Start button at the bottom left-hand side of your screen, clicking on the RUN option and typing the command \\reba and hitting OK.

Many departments have a space set up on the network to store shared files. This space, called a folder, should be set up for you to easily access using any of your application software. You can map this network folder to one of your available drive letters on your pc. All this means is that, instead of retrieving or saving a file to your internal hard drive (the c drive which is located inside your computer), you are retrieving or saving a file to your department network drive (the ‘L’ drive on my pc but it can be whatever letter best suits you, with some limitations).

In addition to the department shared network space, you have some private space on the network. When you log into your pc, you will have a drive mapped on the network (the ‘y’ drive on my computer). You can use this space to store private documents. More about this space will be discussed later in this document.

Mapping a Network Drive

In order to connect to and access networked programs and resources, you must first map a drive from your computer to the appropriate section of the server. Mapping a drive makes your computer think it has an additional drive(s), which are actually areas of the servers. These mapped drives are designated by letters, just as your hard drive and floppy drives have letters.

You map a drive by designating the computer name the shared resource is on, and the name of the shared directory. Computer names are designated by two backslashes (\\) followed by the computer name, and shared directories are designated by one backslash (\) followed by the directory name.

1. Right-click the My Computer icon (usually located in the upper left-hand corner of the desktop)

3. Select any available drive letter (exception: if you want to run any of the Corel WordPerfect 6.1 suite applications over the network, you must select drive letter f for this program)

4. In the path field, type the appropriate computer name and directory (e.g. for the faculty share, the computer name is reba, and the directory is faculty, so the path would be \\reba\faculty).

5. Make sure the reconnect at logon box is checked so you don't have to do this again.

It will save you time and headaches if you will come up with a plan for saving your files. There are several options available for saving files and it takes only a little bit of planning to ensure that you will be able to easily find and easily backup the work that you have done on your computer.

First, you need to think about the files that you create. You may want to think about your computer as you would a file cabinet. You can create folders to hold computer files just as you can use a manila folder to hold paper documents. What I do, for example, is the following:

Windows 95 creates a folder automatically called My Documents. I use this as my starting point, or my main file cabinet. I then create folders under the My Documents folder that actually contain the files. For example, I may have a folder called Papers where I store copies of any papers that I write. I have a folder called Letters that contain letters that I send. I also may create folders under one of these categories. For example, I may have a folder called Off-campus that contains letters that I send to people off-campus.

Once you have the structure or organization of your files figured out, you need to decide where you want to actually store the files. You have several options here as well.

Frequently, we store files on the hard drive. Most newer computers have very large hard drives (normally the c drive) and therefore it is convenient and safe to store the files here. The disadvantage to doing this is that you are responsible for backing up important files in case you were to have a system crash.

For many good reasons, many people store files on their floppy drives (normally the a drive). When we used older, smaller computers, this was a very good way of operating. However, with the newer and faster hardware, using floppy drives as your primary storage device is not the way to go. Floppy disks are notorious for going bad. They also slow down your work because hard drives access the data stored on the disk faster than floppy drives. So, only use floppy drives to backup important files and to transport a document from one computer to another.

When you log on to your pc, you should (or will soon) see a message telling you that you are logging on to your own personal network drive. This space is provided for you to save files just like your hard drive. There are, however, several advantages for saving your files on the network drive. First, this drive is backed up by ITS. Second, if you wanted to work on the file on someone else’s pc (or use the file in a class that you were teaching in one of the classrooms that has a computer), you would have full access to the file. The main disadvantage of storing files on the network drive is that the files wouldn’t be available if the network was down. Of course, you can’t run most of the software if the network is down anyway!

Many departments have a network drive set up for their departments. If you save a file to this directory, everyone in the department can see the file, edit the file, and delete the file. In addition, there are ways of adding security to these files so that only certain people can have access to them.

There is a special shared drive set up for faculty and a separate one set up for staff. If you save a file to either of these folders, everyone in that group (i.e. all faculty or all staff) can see the file, edit the file, and delete the file. In addition, there are ways of adding security to these files so that only certain people can have access to them. You would use this if you wanted someone in a different department to see a file that you had created. For example, if you were in the Religion department and you wanted someone in the Sociology department to see a document you were working on, you could put it in the faculty shared directory and let him/her know to look for the file there. Remember, however, that anyone who happens to be looking in the shared directory could see the file.

Windows Explorer is the comprehensive organization and management tool for Windows 95 files and folders. Using this tool, you can view all the files and folders on a selected drive (such as your hard drive, your floppy disk drive, or a network computer), open the file or folder, move and copy them, rename them, delete, print, and use files on other locations on the network.

You may want to display the Windows Explorer icon on your office toolbar or your desktop for easy access to this tool, which you will probably use often. However, you can also access Windows Explorer by clicking Start, pointing to Programs, and clicking Windows Explorer. The following illustration shows the Exploring window in Web style (the Exploring window will look slightly different if you are using Classic style). Learn more about web style and Classic style in the next section “Using the Desktop.”:

Left pane

you see all of the available drives and folders. If a drive or folder has a plus sign next to it, it means the drive or folder contains subfolders. Click the plus sign to display the subfolders.

Right pane

you see the contents of the selected drive or folder. This includes all of the subfolders you can see in the left pane, but it also includes all of the files on that level of the drive or folder. (Files are not displayed in the left pane.)

With Windows Explorer it is fast and easy to open, move, create and organize your files and folders. And with Windows 95 and Microsoft Internet Explorer, you can even browse the Web from the Exploring window (just click Internet Explorer in the left pane, your default home page will open in the right pane and the URL will appear in the Address bar). In the next section, “Using the Desktop,” you will learn how to create folders and organize your files in them.

To move several files at the same time that are listed consecutively, click the first file you want to move and then, holding down the shift key, click the last file you want to move. All of the files in between will be selected and you can drag them all to the new location.

If you want to move more than one file, but they are not listed consecutively, hold down the CTRL key while you select the files, then drag them to the new location.

To create a new folder

1. Open Windows Explorer.

Make sure the hard drive (usually C:) is selected. Click File, point to New and click Folder.

A new folder will appear in the right side of the window with the title New Folder selected.

2. Type in a new title such as “Grades.” In Windows 95, you can use spaces, symbols, and numbers in your file and folder names.

3. Click View and then click Refresh.
Your new folder will appear in the left side of the window.

4. You are now ready to move the individual spreadsheets into the “grades” folder. Right now they are stored in the My Documents folder.

5. In the left side of the window, click the folder where the files or documents are currently stored. The individual documents will appear in the right side of the window.

6. Click on a document, and then holding down the left mouse button, drag the document to the new folder and release the mouse button.

7. There are four ways to view the files in the right side of the Explorer window: as large icons, as small icons, as a list, or as a list with details including file size, type, and last date modified. You can select how you view files in Explorer from the View menu. You can also sort files by date, type, or size.

1. In a folder window, such as in Windows Explorer, click Views and select Details. This will display the files in the folder in a list with the file name, size, type, and last date modified.

1. Sort files by clicking the buttons at the top of the details columns. (The default arrangement is by name.)

· Click Type to sort files by type such as Application, Microsoft Word Document, or Video Clip. Files will be organized first by type in alphabetical order. Next, all files of a type will be listed together in alphabetical order by file name.

· Click Modified to sort files by the date they were last saved, from most recent to oldest.

Eventually you may want to create a folder for each student’s grades. You can do this the same way you created the Grades folder. If you want each student folder to be a subfolder within the Grades folder, click the Grades folder in the Explorer window and then click File, point to New and click Folder to create a new student subfolder.

There are several ways to copy and move files from one folder to another. You can either use a ‘drag and drop’ method, or you can actually use a ‘copy (cut) and paste’ method.

· To ‘drag and drop’ a file, simply select the file with your mouse. Then, click on the left mouse button and move the file to another folder. As you will see with some practice, this is sometimes a little difficult to do, especially if you have a lot of folders appearing on your screen.

· Many times, I use the ‘cut and paste’ method. Simply highlight the file, click on the right mouse button, and select the ‘cut’ command. Then, find the destination folder, right click on the folder and select the ‘paste’ command.

· To select more than one file in a given folder, just click on each file with your left mouse button while holding down the ctrl key. To select a series of files, click on the first file, then hold down the shift key and click on the last file.