Thanx for previous help....now caveman got question

Can anyone out there tell me, in English, not computerese, what the two things that often come up in the top bar of the desktop really do!

One calls itself "finder" doesn't seem to "find" anything

The other one calls itself "Preview" but it doesn't seem to preview, review or any other kind of view.

Are these just arcane secret code words dreamed up by wizards at Apple? Or what?

Yes....I've read the book on baby apple laptops.....but don't understand what the authors are talking about.

Would appreciate any insights or magical code breakers you might know about.

PS: I received good suggestions re: accessing my writings through folks on this forum. Thanks again

The Finder is basically where all of the folders are. When you open it, you will see that it has all sorts of things listed on the left side.

You can click on Desktop and see listed everything on your desktop, or select Applications and you will see all the cool software that your computer has. (For example, TextEdit and Microsoft Word are applications.)

The Finder can also help you search for things on your computer using "spotlight" on the top far right corner of your screen. It looks like a Q but I think it's supposed to be a magnifying glass.

Preview is the application that will open images. If you click on an image (and unless you tell the computer differently) Preview will open it for you. Preview lets you do a little editing and cropping and resizing of the pictures, too.

If you click just on Preview, you will not have an image until you tell it "open" from the "file" menu at the top. If you select "open," the Finder will automatically bring up all the images you have on your computer, and you can select from there which image you want to see. If you don't have any images on your computer yet, though, I guess it won't bring up anything.