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Once you have created a document, you need to save it to the hard disk.  While you are working, the text and other items you may have entered is stored in the computer's RAM.  RAM is a a storage area that operates very quickly, but all data in RAM is lost when the computer is turned off.  You need to save the file, that is, write it to your hard disk, if you want to keep it.  Also, when you save a file the first time, you give it a name so that you can open it later.

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Let's  look at saving a file in Wordpad . When you have finished typing your document in Wordpad, click File > Save.

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The Save dialog opens. By default the dialog opens to a folder called My Documents.

The first time you do this, My Documents may be empty. On this machine, I've already created a number of folders inside My Documents, so these folders are listed.

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Wordpad has already entered a name in the File name input box. However, you'll probably want to change this to something more descriptive.

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Here I've entered in a different name for this new document.

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Clicking on the Save button will cause the file to be saved.

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Here I've clicked on the Save button, the file has been saved with the name I gave it, and the Save dialog has closed.

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The name given to the file now appears in the titlebar. (The ".rtf" at the end of the name is called a file extension, and is added automatically. It is used to indicate the file type, and will be explained in more detail in a later tutorial).

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Now that the file has been given a name by saving it for the first time, we can save subsequent changes to the document by clicking on the Save icon in the toolbar.

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If we now click on File > Save, the Save dialog does not open. Instead, the file is simply saved (i.e. written to the hard disk) with the name we gave it.

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In order to display the Save dialog again, we need to click on File > Save As.

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Here we have clicked on Save As, and have essentially the same dialog that we saw before when we first saved the document. If we now click on the Save button, the document will simply be saved. But, since we have this dialog open, we also have the option of saving the file with a new name. This will create a new copy of the file on the hard disk with a new name.

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We can also create a new folder, and save the file into that (with the same name or a new name). Click on the New Folder icon.

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A new folder is created.

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By entering a new name in the indicated area (a blinking cursor appears) we can change the name of the new folder.

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Double-click on the new folder, and the contents of the new folder appear in the main window of the dialog (it is empty, of course). The name of the folder we are "in" appears at the top of the dialog in the Save in box.

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Clicking on the dropdown menu for Save in displays all of the folders "above" the current folder. You can navigate to a different folder via this dropdown.

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Here the nameof the document has been changed.

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Clicking on Save will save this document with the name "Another test document.rtf" in the folder "Yet another folder", which is a folder "under" (i.e., contained in) My Documents.

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Here we've clicked on save, the Save dialog has closed, and the new document name is appearing in the title bar of Wordpad.

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