Now that you know how to open a program, lets say you need to type a letter of thanks to your village board for purchasing the computer for you. Go ahead and click "start", then go to programs and (let’s say you have Microsoft Word) click on Microsoft Word. When Word opens up you will see what looks like a blank piece of paper. The first thing we need to do is save the letter or file. To do this we can do it two ways. One is to click on "file" on the top left toolbar and select "save as" from the menu, or we can click on the little disk icon on the second from the top toolbar. When we click on either one a dialog box named "Save As" will appear. In this window we can chose where we want to save the file and we can also name the file what we want to. In this example we will save the file in "My Documents" and name the file " Thank you letter to board". To choose the location, click on the down arrow next to the word "save in:" and double click on my documents. Then in the box for file name you can type in the name of the file. Also you can choose the type of file that it is and the default for Microsoft Word is "word document". When you are done click on save and your document will be saved in the specified folder. Notice at the very top of the window in the blue bar will appear the file name. Now to access this file, you can double click on the "My Documents" folder on your desktop and the letter will be listed there. If you double click on the file it will open Microsoft Word and the file at the same time.

Now lets say that you write a lot of letters and have other files stored in "My Documents". To reduce this clutter we can make separate folders in "My Documents" to store specific files. This will make finding files much easier. To do this we can double click on the "My Documents" folder on our desktop. Now we are looking at all the files in "My Documents". Right click on an open area on the screen and a menu will appear. Move your cursor up to "New" and another menu will appear and click on "Folder". Now a new folder will appear. To change the name of the folder, right click on the folder and click on "Rename". Now the folder name is highlighted, and all you need to do is type the new name of the file (for this example we will call it "Thank You Letters"). When you are done typing just click on an open area and the file is renamed. To move files now into this folder, locate one that you want and using your left mouse button, click and hold down the button and drag the file over on top of the new folder and let go of the mouse button. Repeat the process to move all the files that are appropriate into the folder. Now the files are in the new folder that you created. To access the files double click on the folder to expose the files. Repeat the process for making new folders and all your documents will now be organized and easier to locate.

When working on projects that take a while to write or to create, it is a good idea to save your work as you go. There is nothing more frustrating than losing a couple of hours of work because you have not saved it as you work. All computers lock up from time to time and it is sure to happen when you least want it to. I learned my lesson the hard way. I was working for about 2 hours on a PowerPoint presentation when my computer locked up and 2 hours worth of work went right down the drain. To avoid this, all you need to do from time to time (say every 5 minutes) is to click on the disk icon once. You will not have to go through the same procedure as before. The file will simply update itself and when your computer locks up, you will only lose the work from your last save.