Nothing is quite as annoying (and if it’s severe enough, stressful) as misplacing an important file. Let’s talk about how you can more easily find one that’s disappeared into your digital storage, whether it lives on your network hardware or in a cloud drive, and earn some points in your boss’ eyes while you’re at it.
In the Moment, Search Needs to Know What to Look For
In most cases, the most applicable search keywords that would pull up your missing document are likely to also pull up dozens of other, extremely similar documents. That’s hardly helpful. To resolve this, include any relevant variables from the advanced search options available to you.
Once your initial search results return, further refine your search by specifying factors such as the file type, author, or last modification date. These are called operators, and can make the entire process much faster by allowing you to ignore results that are less relevant—pruning false positives, in a way.
This alone should help greatly, but to really solve the issue (and avoid a frequent problem with file storage), there needs to be a more fundamental change.
For Real Change, Your Final Documents Need a Strictly Assigned Space
Be honest… how often do you seek out a file, only to see the following:
“Proposal Draft - Final”
“Proposal Final Draft - Bill Edits”
“Proposal Final Draft v2”
“Proposal USE THIS ONE finaldraft v2 v3 FINAL”
This situation is a mess and is certain to cause problems down the line.
To resolve it, you need to actively step in and establish standards for where all final documents are to be stored and how they should be named. By defining these standard practices, you prevent errors and minimize confusion. This is why collaborative platforms and tools, like Microsoft SharePoint and Google Drive, are so useful… they provide the means to minimize the need for duplicates.
We Can Help!
Techworks Consulting, Inc. is here to help the businesses and organizations of Long Island with their business technology needs, which includes setting you up with the tools to prevent redundant work and miscommunications—from implementing the required equipment and hardware to configuring and organizing the folder structure.
Give us a call at (631) 285-1527 to learn more about what we can do.
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