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Linux is conveniently structured so that you can save all of your information in a master documents folder, usually labeled with your user name, in the Linux "Home" directory. Within your personal master documents folder, you can create sub folders for different categories like photos, videos, podio books, resume revisions, downloaded reference documents, etc.

You can think of your documents folder as an electronic filing cabinet. This filing cabinet will contain file drawers (folders). The file drawers contain hanging files for major projects (subfolders). The hanging files contain manila folders (further sub-subfolders), which contain the documents themselves (documents, spreadsheets, music files, videos, etc.)

Create subfolders in your master documents folder, to store your work logically by project, customer name or whatever works for you. After you have set up your subfolders, find each of your documents, spreadsheets, presentations, correspondence, music, etc. in whatever location you've already stored it, and drag it into its most appropriate folder.

Don't worry about doing this all at once, or about getting it exactly right the first time. You can save new files as you create them and move old files as you use them. If you want to make a change later, you can quickly and easily rename or move the folders just as you can with files.

If you use your master documents folder, many programs such as OpenOffice automatically point new files to that folder. If you want to save a file created by one of these programs into a subfolder of your master documents folder, just double-click the subfolder before clicking the Save button.

Modern programs, will know where your documents folder in the Home directory is, and will automatically save files to it for you. You just need to select the appropriate subfolder you want to use. For older programs and those that don't automatically know where the Home directory is, the program sometimes makes it easy for you to point it to the Home folder. Somewhere within most program's internal settings is a spot to indicate where it saves files it creates. You will need to change these settings from within the program itself. The place to make that change may be hiding in a menu selection labeled User Settings, Default Locations, File Defaults, Paths, Preferences, Options, etc. Each program is different.

To make it easy to get to frequently used files or folders, create shortcuts to them, and put the shortcuts where they're handy. What's a shortcut? See this article.

You can create a shortcut on the K-Menu in KDE, on the desktop, or as launchers on the Gnome or KDE panels. We have covered how to do this in previous episodes #9 and #11. You will also find articles at articles.goinglinux.com with step-by-step instructions and examples.

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