- Find an Item
- Create a New Folder
- Rename a Folder or Document
- Make an Alias (Shortcut)
- Change an Icon
- Set a Color Label
- Move, Copy, or Delete a Document or Folder
- Burn a CD/DVD
- Add a Newly Installed Hard Disk to the System
- Partition a Hard Disk
- Set Up Software RAID
- Assign a Folder Action
- Add a Second Display
- Set the Time and Date
- Enable Automatic Time Synchronization (NTP)
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Create a New Folder
See Also
Rename a Folder or Document
Change an Icon
Set a Color Label
The basic unit of document storage is the folder. A folder can reside in any place on a disk, and folders (and folders within folders within folders) are what make up the hierarchical organization of any Mac OS X system.
Mac OS X provides a number of special-purpose folders inside your Home folder for storing certain kinds of documents. You can always create new folders to suit your purposes, and you can keep those new folders anywhere you like. For instance, you might create a folder on your Desktop to hold Word files for a project you're working on, and then move that folder into your Documents folder when you're done with it, so that you can easily find it later. The first step in all this organizational wizardry is creating that new folder.
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Figure
3.2-
Open the Find Dialog Box
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Select the Searching Scope
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Add Search Criteria
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Search for Matching Items
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Explore the Search Results
Choose File, Find or press Command + F while in the Finder. The Find dialog box appears.
Use the Search in drop-down menu to define where you want the Finder to look for your items. The Everywhere option uses all available disks and network resources; Local disks uses only the disks physically attached to (or inside) your computer; Home uses only your Home folder.
The Specific places option brings up a new panel in which you can specify individual disks or folders to search in; drag them from the Finder directly into the window, or use the Add and Remove buttons to edit the list of data sources. You can then include or omit individual sources using the check boxes next to them.
The Find dialog box allows you to specify as many different searching criteria as you want; all the criteria must apply for the results to match. For instance, you can search for items whose filename contains art, whose filename begins with A, whose kind is audio, and whose last-modified date is after last Christmas. You make room for new criteria by clicking the + icon after any criterion line; then use the drop-down menus to define what kind of criteria they are and what sort of comparisons to use. Use the – icon on any criterion line to delete that criterion.
When you're done fine-tuning the search criteria, click Search. The Finder will pop up a new window to show the search results, which appear in the listing as they are found.
TIP
Use the Refresh button (the little round button with the circle-arrow) in the upper-right corner of the result window to perform the same search again, in case the disk contents have changed since your first search.
Click any item in the search results window, and its location on the disk is shown in a path listing at the bottom of the window. You can see the series of folders (in a horizontal layout) you'll have to navigate through to get to the item; if you click the horizontal dividing line just below the horizontal scroll bar and drag it upward, the view changes to a hierarchical, staggered view of the folders.
You can double-click a file anywhere in the search results window to launch it in its opener application; double-click any folder to open it in a Finder window. You can also drag any file or folder from the results window to the Desktop or another Finder window to move it.