Manage your files more efficiently

File management is one of hardest things to organise on your computer, and harder on a network where multiple people may have access to the same files but with different ideas of where they should be stored and how they should be named. In order to maintain your filing structure, you first need to know what you have and where they are. This is especially true with data that you have just received, maybe from a client or the other side in a dispute, and you need to understand what you have, quickly.

Windows Explorer is not the best tool to do that. You can only see one folder at a time, and accessing more than basic information can be difficult, to say the least. Also, its search facilities are limited and results for non-indexed locations can be slow. And once you have got the results, you cannot copy them so that you can paste the file names en masse into a Word document or spreadsheet; instead, you have to select and copy the names one at a time.

In addition, there is a depth of hidden information that is arguably even more useful to you, the user, than what it does show. For instance, you may want to see only Word files that you last saved. Or maybe Excel files that you initially created, and somebody else may have subsequently edited. How about photographs that were taken in a specific location, videos created by a certain encoding process, or MSG emails that had PowerPoint attachments and were sent in the last two weeks? (This is something which Windows cannot help with at all.) You may be able to find what you are looking for, but how much time will it take?

Another way to assist with file management can be to create snapshots of how your hard drive, a network drive, or a set of folders looked like on a particular day. This way, you can know with certainty what files and folders were present at a point in time. This can be useful if, for example, you wanted to send out a CD or hard drive to a client, and needed to document its contents. (See this article on how that has saved me on more than one occasion, and why memorialising can be a good discipline.) Additionally, searches are faster if you have already got the files cataloged on a previous occasion.

For bigger companies, there are solutions out there which cost big money, but what if you don't need that. We have had the above problems, which is why we came up with four pieces of software, some of which we have been using for over the last 11 years.

Filecats Standard and Filecats Explore are file and folder catalogers and file-list managers, which capture the file and path information, together with commonly used attributes such as dates and size, and inserts them into a table, so that you can then filter, sort, and copy and paste them as you wish.

Filecats Professional and Filecats Metadata go further. As file cataloguers, they can do all of the above. As metadata extractors, they can capture up to several hundred additional fields of document properties. This include items such as: