Learn about accessing and navigating folders on your Mac.
In this lesson for macOS Mojave on the Mac, I look at how you can access various folders including your Documents folder or Downloads folder, as well as how to navigate folders on the Mac.
Video Transcript (video also has closed captions):
Introduction: In this video, we’re going to take a look at how we can access common folders and navigate easily through different folders on our Mac. We’re going to do this through the Finder on the Mac. Let’s go to my Mac. Now, the first thing we need to do is we need to make sure that we’re looking at or working in our Finder. How do we do that? Well, all we have to do is click on the Desktop, and then when you do that, you’re going to be in your Finder.
Accessing Folders through Go in the Menu Bar: Now, with the Mac, we have various folders. We have our Downloads folder. We have our Desktop folder. We have a Documents folder. To get easy access to these folders, we have to go over to Go in the menu bar, as long as we’re in the Finder, and then you’re going to see all of these different folders. I want to go to my Desktop. I click on it, and now I’m looking at my Desktop folder. I want to go to my Downloads folder. I go up to Go in the menu bar, and then we go over to Downloads, select it, and now I’m looking at my Downloads folder.
Accessing Folders through a Window: I also have easy access to my folders through a window. How do we open up a window? Well, when we’re in our Finder, we can go up to File in the menu bar and then go to New Finder Window, or what we can do is we can go to the smiley face, the Finder in the dock. So I’m going to go and click on the Finder here. And now we have our window.
Accessing Folders through the Window Sidebar: Over on the left in our sidebar, which we’ve briefly covered, you’re going to see we have our folders. We can customize what folders are in the sidebar here. Let’s see how we get around. So I want to go to my Applications folder. I click on it, and now I’m looking at all my applications. I want to go to my Documents folder. Click on it, and now I’m looking at all my documents. I can also double-click on a folder. So what we’re going to do is, we’re going to go to my Home. Let’s go up to Go here, and let’s go over to Home. I’ll talk a little bit more about Home in the next lesson when we talk about the folder hierarchy. It’ll make better sense when you see it in the big picture of how our Mac is structured. But right now, let’s go to our Home.
Home Folder: Our Home contains different folders, our Desktop folder, our Documents folder, our Downloads folder. What I want to do is I want to open up one of these. Well, all we have to do is just double-click on it. So I’m going to go over to Documents. I double-click on it, and now I’m looking at my documents. If I want to go back, I click on the left arrow here, and it takes me back. So let’s go over to Music. Double-click on it, and now I’m looking at my music. If we’re looking at our folders and files in List view here, what we can also do is click on the triangle.
Folder Views: When I click on the triangle, you’re going to see all of the files and folders in that folder. So now, these are all the files and folders in that folder. I want to open up another folder. I click on the triangle, and now I can see all the files and folders in that folder. I click on the triangle again, and it closes. This only works when we’re looking at it in List view. If I go to Column view, then what I can do is I can open them up through columns. So here I’m looking at my Music folder. In my Music folder, I have iTunes. In iTunes, I have iTunes Media. Click on iTunes Media; I have Automatically Add to iTunes and Downloads. So I can keep selecting these folders to open them up. I scroll back over to the right to go back to my other folders. So now I’m going to go and click on List again. So now we’re looking at our List.
Now, what I want to do is, I want to go back to my Home folder. Well, an easy way of doing that is going up to the folder name in the window. We can see I’m in my iTunes Media folder here. If I hold down the Command key on my keyboard, this is the first key command you’re going to learn, if I hold down the Command key and click, I can see all of my folders. So my iTunes Media folder is located in my iTunes folder, which is located in my Music folder, which is located in my User folder. So I want to go to my User folder. I click on it, and now I’m in my User folder. Let’s go over to Documents. I double-click on it, and I’m at my documents. I want to go back to my Home folder. I hold down the Command key, go up to the top of the window, go to macOS Mojave, and I’m back.
So that’s how we can easily traverse through our different folders. So that’s how we access our different folders and how we can easily navigate our folders on the Mac.