- Most people store documents, pictures,
and other types of files on the storage drive
on their computer.
Like a filing cabinet you might have in your office.
File Explorer is the tool that you use
to browse through those files and folders.
Now I have a shortcut to File Explorer
pinned to the task bar,
so that's a very easy way to open it.
But for now I'm going to right click on that
and unpin it from the task bar so we can see how to get it
if you do not have that shortcut there.
So what you'll need to do is go to the start menu,
and you may have it here in the pinned applications
on the start menu,
or you might need to click where it says, All apps
to go to the list of all applications,
and you can find it and launch it from there.
Or what you'll probably want to do is right click on it.
And if it's not already pinned to the start menu,
you'll see an option here to pin it,
or we can go to this, More sub menu
and we can choose this option
to pin it back to the task bar.
So now I have it back on the task bar and it's really easy
to launch it from there.
So this is the File Explorer window.
On the sidebar on the left,
I can select a location, then on the right I can navigate
through the contents of that location.
I want to start by selecting this PC over on the left.
This is a good starting point.
This is like standing in front of the filing cabinet.
Everything on your computer is stored inside here.
With this selected, I can see some shortcuts
to some popular folders and below that I can see
the drives on my computer.
If you have a CD drive or a secondary hard drive,
you'll see a few items listed here,
but at the very least you should see the drive labeled C.
Storage drives are each labeled with a letter.
And historically the primary storage drive on a computer
has always been the C drive.
So let's open up the C drive and take a look around.
I could just double click on it right here.
Or I could go back to the sidebar on the left,
I could click this arrow next to where it says, This PC
to expand it.
And you can see there is a shortcut
to the C drive right here.
So I can select that.
And now I'm looking at the contents of my C drive.
So opening the C drive is like opening
your computer's main filing cabinet.
And we see a bunch of folders here,
and some of them have some pretty cryptic names.
We're not going to identify specific folders quite yet.
For now, you should see that you can double click
on a folder to open it up
and see the contents of that folder,
which in this case is just more folders.
It's very common to have folders inside of folders,
inside of other folders, and so on,
just like a physical filing cabinet in the real world.
Now, as you're navigating through these folders,
it's always important to know where you are.
That's why you have this path bar near the top.
I can see that I am in this PC in the C drive
in a folder called Program Files.
The path shows you exactly which folder
you're currently looking at,
along with each proceeding location
that got you to that point.
And I can click on any item along this path bar
to backup to that location.
And let's double click to open another folder here.
And you can take a step up in the folder structure
at any time by clicking this up arrow, near the left.
But I think it's much more common to click
the back arrow in the top left,
which takes you back to the previous folder
you were just in.
So let's pause here.
For now, you should take a look around
and start getting familiar with opening folders
and navigating around in File Explorer.