Getting Organized (2)

Introduction

Once upon a time…

Computers did not have Hard Drives

Personal computers at home were a rarity

The only speaker was a tiny internal one and a breakthrough was making it “sing” Mary Had A Little Lamb.

There was no digital photography

There were no camcorders

PCs were not built to be PVRs (Personal Video Recorders)

That was then; this is now. We are long past the time when all information – operating systems, documents, spreadsheets, etc. – had to fit on 5 ¼ inch floppy diskettes. The explosion of capacity in Hard Drives has led to storage analogous to a warehouse rather than a loose-leaf note book. It is definitely time to get organized.

Is it easy to get organized? Maybe, if you are truly anal retentive and value order over time. For most of us it is a boring, time-consuming, never-ending task better done later than now. Rarely, when shopping, do we envision where that latest impulse item is going to be stored. It is taken for granted that perishable food will go into the refrigerator, canned goods into the pantry, and linens into the hall closet. We will find them easily by their labels, physical characteristics, and our five senses – hopefully not the sense of smell in the case of food.

Items on a PC are of a different breed. We will use our available senses but not as directly as laying hands on the object. We cannot “read” a disk with our eyes nor listen to a recorded sound without an electronic go-between. Use a PC and you must play the role of a librarian – cataloguing and indexing – or run the risk of never seeing that important note you created days ago.

Files and Folders

We say files and folders because American English prefers words with less syllables precede ones with more syllables. Syntactically, it is Folders and Files. Folders hold Files, not the other way around. What is a File? Commonly, it is any entity that can be named and saved to non-volatile media: Hard Drive, Floppy, CD, flash memory card, etc. Upon creation, a file exists in ROM (Read Only Memory). Shutting down the computer without saving it to one of the media mentioned and you have created it on smoke. It is gone, disappeared as if it never existed.

The latest OS's take a step in the right direction by creating default folders , such as My Documents and within which sub-folders like My Music, My Pictures, and My Videos exist. The term for this is nested folders and the full path is the complete address to a file starting with a drive letter followed by folders nested as deep as required to get to that particular file. Example: C:\My Documents\My Letters\Family\John041117.txt. It is my habit to include a date in the filename unless it is irrelevant or makes the filename cumbersome.

If you want to be able to quickly find something you have created on a PC, you cannot treat the computer akin to unlabeled boxes in an attic, basement, or garage. “I know I saved it, but now I can not find it” just doesn't cut it. In Windows, Explorer (not Internet Explorer) is your file manager. It is within the application that you can create, rename, and delete folders. If you bring up two instances of Explorer and right-click on an empty area of the Task bar, a pop-up menu will permit you to tile the windows either horizontal or vertical. Then, after selecting a file or folder, holding down the right button of the mouse allows you to drag the icon/name to another destination (folder or, even, Desktop). Once there, a release of the right button yields a pop-up menu to Copy, Move, Create a Shortcut or Cancel.

An Aside: icon is from the Greek and means a pictorial representation. In the case of Windows, the icon for a folder is the ubiquitous yellow manila folder of which you probably have many about the house and office. They are often stuffed with old bills and other worthless items that you will never again look at.

If you have a problem with controlling the mouse, the menu item Edit has a Copy to … and Move to… feature. They both open a dialog box showing existing folders and allow for the creation of a new folder. If you wish to create a new folder as a sub-folder of another, make sure the parent folder is selected before you hit the Make New Folder button.

The My Documents Folder

I said this was a step in the right direction by Microsoft but it can be like a bottomless pit if you allow it. Creating sub-folders can get addictive – you can nest folders so deep that it is difficult to see the full path on the screen. If you create category named folders that are excessively broad, like BILLS or HOLIDAYS, the population of sub- and sub-sub folders to pinpoint file locations can become overwhelming. As in most endeavors, the individual sense of what is organized and what is chaos is an extremely personal choice.

My advice with respect to the default folders is to use them as a guide and in a limited fashion. For instance, if you have multiple drives or partitions, consider moving the My Document folder and its contents from the C: drive. In my setup, the C: drive is reserved for the operating system and necessary applications and shortcuts that will not function elsewhere.

One piece of advice that I can give with conviction is: DO NOT STORE YOUR DATA IN THE SAME FOLDER AS THE APPLICATION THAT CREATED IT. When backing up your data (and we all do this in a timely fashion, of course) it makes no sense to copy the program when all we need is the product of that program.

This tree of folders gives a snapshot of a possible structure for home management. The Finance, Health, Home, and Vehicles would typically hold spreadsheet files. If you have an advanced spreadsheet program (such as Microsoft's Excel) that creates workbooks with multiple worksheets, you could reduce the folder count by incorporating similar data into one workbook. For example, a single Health workbook could contain the Dental and Medical data as separate worksheets. For a family, you could have individual worksheets for each member or simply use a column of the spreadsheet to identify to which member the data is relevant.

In the example it does not take a stretch of the imagination to conclude that ‘Checking' and ‘Saving' are part of “Finance.' Why bother with any sub-folders for ‘Finance'? Because I go to Checking more frequently than Saving. Another file, Investments.xls, is accessed even less frequently. It resides in the parent folder, Finance. The file that I access very frequently is the data for Macon Users Group members. For this file I created a link in Explorer to get there in a hurry. As stated earlier, approaches to being organized is very personal, so flavor it to your own taste.

Digital Photos

With the advent of digital cameras and their wide appeal, the accumulation of images can be staggering. After all, what does it cost to take 10 snapshots instead of 1? It is easier to just save them all rather than spend time deciding which to save and which to dump. The file sizes of photos can vary tremendously, from less than a Kilobyte (KB) to tens of Megabytes (MB). If you use a photo editor on your computer you will often wish to keep the originals from the camera along with your edited versions. In spite of the large sizes of reasonably priced Hard Drives, it would not take long for an active shutterbug to approach the disk's capacity.

The easy solution is to offload the data by burning a CD. A CD-R holds about 700 MB of data – this could easily be a thousand images. How do you find that family photo showing Uncle Fred in an embarrassing moment?

The first step is to rename photos meaningfully. From a camera they typically have filenames such IMG_00nn.JPG. Many commercial programs have a facility for batch naming and Windows can do it for you - for free. For a common theme, such as a holiday party, select the photos as a group. If they are contiguous in Explorer, select the first one, hold down the <Shift> key and select the last. All intervening files will be selected. For a non-continuous group, hold down the <Ctrl> key as you click on each file. Now right-click the last one and hit Rename on the pop-up menu. Typing the new filename will apply it to the last and all the others will share that name with a numbered index JOES_PARTY2004 (1), JOES_PARTY2004 (2) Now select the one without the index, right-click and Rename, adding the last index number.

Okay, now you have tens of CDs and thousands of photos. How can you label the CDs? What would be the label size if every file were listed? How could I find anything among the paper generated?

My answer is not to “put everything on paper.” Computers were meant to reduce paperwork not create it. In most cases there is little chance for that to apply; in this case there is a solution. Create a text file, searchable, listing the contents of each CD. The physical CD label could be as simple as a Volume Number or something just a little more informative such as subject and date.

The method is to use a DOS (Disk Operating System) command – DIR (stands for Directory). An extension of the command allows us to send the info directly to a file which we can then peruse or print out and scan at our leisure without the necessity of inserting the disk into its drive.

As a first step I suggest creating a text file for the information. This is important as you will need the full path (specific location) of this file in the command. If you have multiple drives, physically or via partitions, select one and create a folder (you may want to make more than one file for categories of CDs). Use Notepad to start a new text file, I called mine CD_Index.txt, and entered a first line such as “Index of My CDs,” and stashed it in a folder called CD_S. You now have a repository for the information about each CD.

With a CD in its drive, bring up the Command Prompt (in WIN XP there is no DOS kernel so Microsoft will not refer to the term DOS) via Start | All Programs | Accessories. The first line is (typically) C:\Documents and Settings\ your name >. If you now enter DOSKEY, it will save you a lot of typing later. DOSKEY remembers the commands you type and brings them back with the cursor keys (arrow keys). If you want to know more about the command, you can type /? for a list of options. You will be using the cursor keys as the mouse does not work in this environment. After you hit Enter to enable DOSKEY, the prompt will return.

Now enter the drive letter for the CD device, followed by a colon (:). This is the same as selecting a drive in Windows GUI. The prompt will change to a single drive letter prompt, d:\>. Your PC is now looking at the CD; type DIR to see the first level of its content. Where you see <DIR> it is a sub-directory or folder that, in turn, you will have to examine to see its content. Now we can direct such info to our text file. The command is DIR (sub-directory name, if chosen) >> full path of the receiving text file. The double >> (greater than) appends the new info to the existing text file instead of replacing the text. An example:

DIR PHOTOS >> d:\CD_S\CD_Index.txt

If the result gives you more sub-directories, such as ALBUM1 within PHOTOS, you need to enter the full path to the sub-directory, such as:

DIR \PHOTOS \ALBUM1\ >> d:\CD_S\CD_Index.txt

Now for DOSKEY's magic – hitting the UP arrow cursor key brings back a copy of the command. Stepping back through the entry with the left cursor key, you can change the 1 of ALBUM1 to a 2 (assuming you have such a sub-directory) and add that content to your text index. The procedure is fast – no Windows baggage – and, once you get started, a minimal amount of typing gets you a lot of data. The procedure gives your mouse a rest, too.

The text file is built as you proceed. You can, of course, make multiple text files but simple editing allows for listing of many CDs. The menu item Edit | Find (Ctrl + F) allows you to search for any text in the document ad the structure of the DIR command quickly identifies the CD it is on.

Eye candy

In a previous Novice SIG session, I spoke of making your own icons as a visual stimulus for differentiation. It is fairly easy to do in Windows' component application, Paint. There are also many Icon Editors – freeware and shareware. Try Google and search for Icon Editor to get lots of hits.

As an example, I made this icon for folders containing tips and articles from magazines.

To change the icon for a folder or file, right-click on it and select Properties. Under the Customize tab you will find a button for Change icon.

Conclusion

As a recurring theme I have tried to emphasize how personal Organization is. The amount of time and effort you are willing to spend on it will pay dividends down the line. I have only touched on a brief number of points gleaned from conversations with PC users. With the new technology of digital photography, digital music brings a whole set of new parameters to the table. The more features and tools added, the more housekeeping we must be responsible for if we are to use those tools efficiently. There is a lot of software available – freeware, shareware, and commercial - to assist us in such tasks but fundamentally it boils down to applying sound principles to avoid disorder, if not chaos.