The arrangement of things you see in Windows can best be described as layers:

Desktop

Wallpaper

Icons

Windows

There are no ‘real’ layers, you can’t peel off the wallpaper and see the Desktop however there are ‘virtual’ layers, arranged with the Desktop on the bottom. What you see behind the icons on the Desktop is called the wallpaper, whereas the whole thing is the Desktop, not just the picture/colour that you see behind the icons. Application windows are layered on top.
You can add shortcuts to your Desktop in a number of ways. The most common way is to right-click on the desktop, which brings up the popup-menu. On the popup-menu there should be a sub-menu labelled ‘New’, hover over this. When the sub-menu pops out find the item labelled ‘Shortcut’ and click it. A dialogue-box will come up asking you where the program or data collection is found. Later we will get into how to form something to type in the box, however it is easier to just click the button beside labelled ‘Browse...’.
The Browse button is a standard button that you will see often, clicking it always brings up a dialogue-box in which you can select programs and data collections. Select the program or data collection you want to make a shortcut to and click the button labelled ‘OK’. The OK button is also a standard button on dialogue-boxes that you click to tell it that you are done filling in information and it can use that data now. ‘OK’ is usually paired with ‘Cancel’, ‘Cancel’ closes the dialogue-box without doing anything.
When you have selected the correct program or data collection click the button marked ‘Next >’. The Next button is, again, a standard button that tells the dialogue box you are done this step and to go on to the next step in the process. It usually comes with the Back button to go to the previous step. This dialogue-box also has a Cancel button. After you have clicked ‘Next’ the dialogue-box comes up with a text-box asking what you want the text under the icon to be for this shortcut. When you have typed what you want into the box click ‘Finish’, another standard button.

NOTE: The true name of these buttons is above in bold. However it is common computer shorthand to say Click ‘OK’ instead of Click the OK button. We will be using this shorthand in this book.