What does the "clean up" on the desktop do

Glad you figured it out, btw it's not really a good idea to store a lot on your desktop. This can lead to slowing down your computer. It much wiser to keep files in the appropriate spots. Like documents should be stored in Documents and Apps in Apps etc...

🙂

"I dropped 500 of my personal font files in the wrong place yesterday.. right into /Library/Fonts.. what a mess.. and Undo wasn't enabled!!!" - From the book "Things You Do That Nobody Should Know"

Fixed right away!! Regards, K.

Hi D,

Click on desktop so you bring Finder to focus, then choose Show View Options on the View menu, there you can set this grid spacing and other options as you wish, keep icons snapped to this grid and arranged.
The Clean Up that you asked will arrange icons in this grid by finding their nearest snapping point and not rearranging all icons sequentially by name, date and others. This is useful if you use to drag everything to desktop.

Good luck.

Because lots of people find it useful. If you don't, don't use it.

But if you ever accidentally dump 500 items onto your desktop while attempting to drag and drop them somewhere else, you'll appreciate it.

Hi D,

No need to enable undo, undo steps are automatically available in some procedures we do under many applications. When it is not there this means that what we have done can not be reverted by the application.

Regards, K.

It cleans up the desktop. If you have files and folders randomly placed on the desktop it aligns them so they don't look so messy.