Accessing my Windows 7 files from my Ubuntu account

Absolutely! Just open up Nautilus the file manager by clicking the Home Icon. On the left hand side of Nautilus you should see a drive symbol that will have a name relating to "windows" or the size of the partition such as "125GB filesystem" (where 125GB is the size of your windows partition). Click that to mount your windows partition and access all your files. A visual guide is located here.