1 April 2008

Computer Dating: Give it a Try

If you are looking for a Tutor Tip about eHarmony and Chemistry.com, I am afraid you have come to the wrong place. The computer dating to which I refer is a simple way to organise your documents.

Oft times, while searching through our documents folders, we look for a file created on a specific date or during a range of dates. The search feature in Windows does a fine job of finding files by date, but that takes time. On occasion, you just want to scroll through your documents to see when a file was made or sort the files chronologically by date of creation. Appending the date to the file name will make these processes easier.

Always use numbers in the date instead of spelling out the month or abbreviating it. While August follows July on the calendar, alphabetically it is the opposite. Use two digits for both the month and the day. This will keep the list alphabetically and chronologically correct. If you use single digits, you will get a list like this when you alphabetize: 1, 10, 11, 12, 2, 3, 4, etc. This does not keep the list in chronological order. I prefer to use four digits for the year, since I have documents going back to the 20th century. Using four digits will avoid confusion as to whether “08” refers to 2008, the 8th day of the month, or August.

When saying or writing the date in Ireland and the rest of Europe, the day of the month precedes the month. Today is 1 April 2008. In the US, it is the opposite: April 1, 2008. To avoid this confusion, computer people settled on a date format that is the same irrespective of your locality. It is called computer dating and it uses only numbers and optional dashes (-) or underscores (_). While ordinary people will sometimes use a slash (/) to separate parts of a date, in computer speak, the slash is a reserved character that separates parts of a Web address.

To use an eight digit number (with or without a dash or underscore), placing the year first, followed by the month and day, is called computer dating. Today is 20080401, or 2008-04-01, or 2008_04_01. Consider the following list of dates:

2007-12-03
2007-12-31
2008-01-15
2008-02-14
2008-03-17
2008-04-01

Not only is the list sorted alphabetically, it is also sorted chronologically.

When adding a date to a file name, place the date after the filename. This way you can keep all of your business report.doc files separate from your charges and invoice.xls file. I prefer placing a space, a dash, and a space between the filename and date to make it easier to visually separate the two.

Here is a list of the most recently created business reports:

Business Report - 2007-12-03.doc
Business Report - 2007-12-31.doc
Business Report - 2008-01-15.doc
Business Report - 2008-02-14.doc
Business Report - 2008-03-17.doc
Business Report - 2008-04-01.doc

Adding the date to revision files of the same document can help if you need to check your progress. Instead of using something like My Life in Kenya, Rev A.doc, you could add the date and have My Life in Kenya – 2008-01-27.doc.

The next time you want to organise your files, try adding a computer date to multiple copies of the same work. It will save you a lot of time and effort down the road.