- [Instructor] To find files on your storage drive,
you could go digging through a long path of folders,
or you can use shortcuts instead.
Here in the File Explorer on the left,
I want to go to this Quick access section.
And you can click the arrow next to that,
to open or close it.
I want to have it open,
because we have some very important shortcuts here.
So for example,
you could click on the shortcut to the Documents folder,
and that takes you straight to the contents of that folder.
Now, I hope you remember that you could go the long way
to get to your Documents folder,
and it is good to know that real full path.
To do that, you could go to This PC over on the left.
Then open your main system drive, that's the C-Drive.
Then inside of that, open the Users folder.
Then open the folder with your name on it.
That's the home folder.
And you might see your documents folder here,
or if you use One Drive,
you might need to open the One Drive folder,
and you can find your documents folder there.
And of course you can open that up to see its contents.
But if you think it's a tedious waste of time
to actually do all that, well, I completely agree.
Most of the time it just makes more sense to
open File Explorer, then click on the shortcut,
and go straight to the contents of that folder.
But I always teach it this way,
because it is important to know that full path
and know where the shortcuts are taking you.
Now over time, you may see other shortcuts
automatically appear on this list.
Permanently pinned shortcuts,
have this Thumbtack icon next to them.
And the ones that do not have that Thumbtack icon,
will appear, or disappear,
based on the folders that you use most often.
If you want one to stay permanently,
you can right-click on it, and choose pin to Quick access.
Or if you want it gone,
you can choose remove from Quick access.
Or if you have an important folder
that does not pop up here automatically,
you can make a new shortcut manually.
So, I could just navigate to whatever folder I want,
click to select that folder,
then right-click on it and choose pin to Quick access,
which gives me a shortcut to that folder right here.
Or if for any reason you don't have
one of these automatic shortcuts,
like you don't have the shortcut to your documents folder,
you could add that manually,
but it does mean following that full, long path
to get to that folder.
But once you locate your documents folder manually,
you could select it, right-click on it,
and pin it to Quick access, if it was not already there.
Now another option is to pin a folder to the start menu.
So you could find a folder, once again, select it,
right-click on it, and choose pin to start.
So now a quick way to get to that folder would be to
go to the start menu.
And in this pin section up at the top,
you've got a shortcut
that takes you straight to that folder.
And of course you can change the order of these icons.
You could drag this up if you want it up here in the top row
or later, if you want it gone,
you can just right-click on it,
and choose unpin from start.
And finally, there is a different technique that you can use
to make a shortcut to either files, or folders.
Once again, select a folder, right-click on it.
But this time we'll go to Show more options,
and I'll choose Create shortcut.
And that gives me a separate shortcut file,
which is really just a link to the original folder.
And I can move this shortcut anywhere.
It's pretty common to make shortcuts to important files
or folders, and then put those on the desktop.
So in the future, when you need to get to that folder,
you can just double-click on that shortcut,
and it takes you straight to that folder
inside of File Explorer.
And if you want to get rid of a shortcut,
you can feel free to delete it.
I'm just going to drag it to the recycle bin.
Deleting a shortcut does not affect the original file
or folder.
So clearly I do think it's very important to know
the full path of where your files and folders are stored,
so you can keep them organized
and you can find them on your drive.
But for day-to-day access to things that you use constantly,
there's nothing wrong with using these shortcuts.