Tip of the Week

Okay, the first 6 tips were pretty straightforward. But today I’m giving you one that will let you dig just a bit.

Why?

Well, as we’ve moved to the new version of Office, we have more e-mail attachments showing up on our desktops that are compressed files. Those are called Archives. And they look like this....

Little icons with a zipper. This means something has been compressed in some way for delivery to you. It can be an e-mail attachment. It can also be a file or application that we’ve downloaded. Either way, when you double-click on it, the files or applications are decompressed.

BUT...

While the file is now there for you to work on, the Archive is still sitting on your desktop. And unless you do a lot of housekeeping, you soon end up with a bunch of those little things all over the place.

Seems like some smart person would have figured out an easy to way to avoid that, huh?

Well they did.

And here is what you can do to solve this problem.

Double-click on your Hard Drive. Now look for your System folder. It will be a folder with a little X on it, like this...

Now let’s dig deeper. Inside the System folder is a Library folder. And inside that Library folder is a folder called CoreServices. Once you get that far, look for Archive Utility. Here is the path you’ve followed...

Double-click on Archive Utility to open it up. Looks like nothing happened, right? But it did. The only thing that changes are your menu options, so look to the top of your screen...

Pull down the Archive Utility menu and select Preferences. When the  Preferences open, look for the pop-up menu for After Expanding. This is where you can tell your computer what to do with all those Archives.

The default setting is Leave Archive Alone. You want to change that to Move Archive To Trash. (That red arrow isn’t on your computer...I added that just to point the way)

Now when you open up one of those compressed files, you’ll still have your file to work with, but you’ll be automatically cleaning up the debris that is left behind!

Note...if you are working on an older version of OS, you might not find this option. But this is a good solution for most of us using any of the recent versions of OS X.