Computer Skills Course File Management Part 1

in order to accomplish any kind of real project on computer it's important to have solid understanding of file management let's start with the fundamentals no matter what operating system you're running whether it's Windows Mac OS or Linux all data on computer is stored as files file is basically chunk of certain kind of data there are many kinds of files including video files audio files image files text files and many many more in order to keep files organized we use folders folder on your computer is just like re life folder it's place you can put files to separate them into groups that make sense every folder has folder name and every file has file name the file name serves couple purposes the first purpose is to help you the user identify what that file is about so if you wrote an essay about climate change for example you might name that file climate essay the second purpose of the file name is to help the computer recognize what kind of file it is so that it knows what program it should use to open it there's special part of the file name that is used for this purpose it's called the file extension at the end of every file name there's period and then letters or numbers that come after it those letters or numbers are the file extension the file extension is very important because without it the computer doesn't know what kind of file it is or what to do with it it's good to keep this in mind when you rename file because if you accidentally change or remove the file extension your computer might not be able to open it anymore and you'll have to rename it again and put the file extension back in order to fix the problem let's look at some common file extensions grouped by category we've got some that are for audio some are for video some that are for images some that are for variety of types of documents and then few other important ones this may look like lot but in reality there are actually many many more you may be wondering why there are so many file extensions why are there dozen different formats just to store one kind of data the answer is that even though they may store the same kind of data they do it differently for example among the audio formats some are uncompressed meaning that the audio is high quality but takes up lot of space and some are compressed meaning that they sacrifice little bit of quality in order to take up less space one of the most common compressed formats that you'll probably recognize is MP3 and one of the most common un compressed formats is wav or wave similar comparison can be drawn between some of the image formats for example PNG or ping is higher quality but takes up more space while JPEG sacrifices some quality for smaller size another reason for the length of this list is that many programs have their own specific formats and file extensions Microsoft Word PowerPoint Excel and Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Photoshop are just few examples shown here all of these file extensions may seem bit overwhelming at first but there's no need to know all of them the ones that are important to your specific work will soon become familiar that concludes this video in the next one we'll take Hands-On look at working with files and folders in an operating system