What are properties?  We’re not talking the little cards that you try to collect when you are playing Monopoly … Park Place, Broadway, Marvin Gardens, Reading Railroad – not those properties!

We’re talking the properties of a file or a folder, or an application (program) or a shortcut.  Or the properties of your hard drive (C).  Or the properties of your Task Bar and Start Menu.  Or the properties of your display. 

Well, as you can see there are properties for practically everything.  How do you get to these properties?  You get to properties by using the right-click button.  If you right-click on any icon in your computer, you will see one of the options in the pop-up menu called Properties.  If you right-click anywhere on the desktop (not on an icon) you will see Properties – these are the Display Properties.  If you right click on the Start Menu, you can get to the Start Menu and Task Bar Properties.  If you right-click on the My Computer icon, you can get to the System Properties.

Properties contains information about the item you just right-clicked on.  For example, if you right click on an icon of a Word file, you will notice 3 tabs at the top – General, Custom, and Summary. 

Here some cool things you can do with these properties.

In the General Tab

• You can see what the size of your file is
• You can make the file Read-only so that it cannot be written over.  This is great if you don’t ever want to lose the contents of a file. 
• You can hide a file – make it no longer visible.  This is nice if you have confidential files that you don’t want others to see.  Note:  To get the file to show after its been hidden, you will need to “Show Hidden Files.”  Open My Computer, Click on the Tools menu, click on Folder Options, click on the View tab, then click on “Show hidden files and folders.”
• You can change which program (application) the file opens with.  A Word file will only open with Microsoft Word.  But a graphics file – like a jpg file – can open with any number of graphic programs.
• You can see the date the file was created, modified, and accessed.

In the Summary tab…

• You can add information in the boxes – notes and comments about the file.
• If you click on the Advanced button, you will get a complete description of the file including the number of pages, words, and characters and a host of other information

OK – so that’s the properties of a document or file.  Next week, some cool things to do with the properties of a program or application.