Managing your files on your M: drive

For several years now we have been using the “M: drive” to save our documents and files. But after you save several files in your “M: drive” it can be rather difficult to find a document. This tutorial will help you learn to manage your files and create “File Folders” to organize your files.

First things first, what is an “M: drive”? The “M: drive” is your personal drive on the file server at each school. When you click on My Computer, you will see different “Drives” listed. Take a look at the picture below.

As you can see above, you have a Floppy drive (A:), (C:) which is your hard drive, a CD drive, and several other drives. The “M: drive” appears in the above picture: Lunab on ‘Rasserver’ (M:). When you Double Click on this drive, you will see all of the documents that you have saved.

Next, we need to know how to save to the “M: drive”. While working on a document, to save a file to your “M: drive” go to the File menu and Choose Save As. After choosing Save As, a new window will appear which looks similar to the next picture.

As you can see, I have clicked in the box beside “Save in” at the top and a list of “Drives” has appeared. I then clicked on my “M: Drive” which is highlighted in blue. I would now type in the name of my document and click “Save”. Follow these steps to save any document from any program to your M: Drive.

Now that we have saved several documents in your “M: Drive”, let’s learn how to organize these files. To start organizing your files, make sure all other programs are closed and you are back to the main Desktop. On the Desktop, double click on “My Computer”. You will then see all of the “Drives” listed. Find your “M: Drive” and double click it. You should now see all of the files you have saved.

Think of your “M: Drive” as a filing cabinet. If you want to put documents in your filing cabinet, you get a file folder. You do the same thing for your “M: Drive”. To create a new “File Folder” for your “M: Drive”, click on the “File” menu at the top. You will see a menu appear. Click New, and choose “Folder”. You will see a new “File Folder” appear in the window where your files are located. It should say “new Folder”. Hit the “backspace” to erase the name and type in the name of this folder, let’s say Science for now. After typing the name of the new folder, hit the “Enter” key. You now have a new “File Folder” called Science.

Now you can “Move” your files from the main “M: Drive” to a folder in your “M: Drive”. To do this, just take your mouse, click on the file you want to move in to the new folder, and “Drag” it to the new folder. To drag a file, you must click on the file and not let go. Then you can drag it over to the new file folder (just put your mouse over the top of the new folder). You will see your file disappear at this point. You can double click on the new Science folder and see that your file has moved.

You can create as many file folders as you would like. This makes searching for documents and files much easier.

Now that you have created a science folder, you can save all of your “Science” related documents to that folder. To save a document in the science folder, go to File, Save As, and choose your “M: Drive”. You will see the folder called Science. Double Click on the Science folder. Type in the name of your new document and click Save. If you need to create a new folder before you save this document, just click on the “Create new folder” Icon before you save the document. Look at the picture below: When you click the button, it creates a folder called “New Folder”. Just hit the backspace key and name the new folder what you need.