A common misperception among my friends is that all their documents are "inside" Microsoft Word. This leads to all sorts of confusion. For example, sometimes they will think a file has disappeared because it no longer shows up on the File menu in Word. Or they will think that they need to open Word before they can edit, copy, rename or delete a file. Recently, I realized this isn't a small issue. It's a basic misunderstanding of the way their computers work. I seem to remember that during the DOS era you needed to open the program that created a file before you could access the file (or I could be hallucinating, it's been a long time). But in any event those days are long gone, and we need to move on, people.
So listen up - nothing is in Word. And that goes for Excel and all your other programs. Here's a simple way to look at it. A program like Word or Excel is just the software that creates the files. The files are independent of the program. A file can be a document, or a photo, a video, or a sound recording. Actually there are many more, but those are the most common.
When you create a file and then choose to save it, you are usually given a choice as to where you want to save it. You may not have realized that if you've always chosen the default location (which is in your "My Documents" folder when you're working in Word). But you really can choose to save it to other places - your desktop, a special folder you've created somewhere else, or onto an external hard drive or flash drive. Your choice.
The good news here is that once you've grasped this idea you can save yourself a lot of time and aggravation when you want to use that file again. Let's say you've saved your most recent document to your desktop, something you might want to do if you plan on editing it a lot. When you want to work on it, do you have to open Word and then find the file in the file menu? No, you do not. All you need to do is double-click on the file icon that's sitting on your desktop and Word will open up automatically and the file along with it. Le voilá.
This works with other types of files, too. If you double-click on a photo file, your photo viewing program will open it up for you. Click on a music file and your music player program will take over. Video? Ditto. Didn't life just get a lot simpler?
I want to keep this post short, so I'll write a separate post that explains how to keep track of all your files now that they've been liberated from Word.