Lesson 9. How to Save Your Work So You Can Use It Again Later Time | This lesson takes approximately 10 minutes to complete. | Goals | To set up a system for saving your work so you'll not only be able to find your saved files with ease, but also protect your work from accidental loss. |
So far, the applications we've been using all automatically save the changes you've made since the last time you opened the application. For example, if you imported songs from a music CD into iTunes, those songs are still there the next time you open iTunes, right? Right. Same thing with iCalit saves all your appointments when you quit iCal. Even if you don't open iCal again for weeks, all your stuff is still there. However, most other applications will require you to save your work before you're done. (For example, remember that fictitious list of people you were going to invite to your next party? Well, once you created your list, you'd have to give it a name and save it.) But there's a little more to saving files than just clicking the Save button, because you have a decision to make: where to save the files on your hard disk. I know what you're thinking: "Since Mac OS X Tiger has Spotlight, why do I even care?" (You were thinking that, weren't you?) Well, here's the thing: Spotlight is great if you can't remember where you saved your files, but if you plan ahead and save your files in an easy-to-find place on your hard disk, then you won't even need Spotlightyou'll be able to go directly to your files. In fact, you'll only need Spotlight when you can't remember where you saved a file. In this lesson, we'll look at how and when to save your files, where to save them, and how to keep your hard disk neat and tidy so everything is right at your fingertips. |