Navigating a File System
Lost a document? . . or a photo? Many times I’ve heard the statement "I lost the letter (substitute brief, document, manuscript, spreadsheet, picture, movie, song - ad infinitum) I had on the screen last week! and been able to quickly find the lost file. The trick is knowing how the file structure in Windows (or Mac OS) is constructed. In layman’s terms it can best be described as an hierarchical tree structure. Big word that, but if you can imagine a family tree - or better still draw one on a sheet of paper - you have just drawn a file structure! Simply replace the Adam and Eve part of the tree with C Drive and the descendants with folders and by George! you've got it! Now family trees are normally drawn horizontally but in the trade we always draw hierarchies vertically, working downwards from the ROOT so a normal representation of a single partition hard-drive is drawn as is the picture (Figure 2). But what do I mean by a single partition hard drive? Open My Computer by whatever means you are comfortable with and change the View to Icons. Figure 1 will display what your computer has and normally you will only see one hard disk (C:)