File under: Software I Can NOT Live Without

How much time have you wasted looking for files on your PC? If it’s more than a minute, stop what you’re doing and go to http://www.voidtools.com/ and get a copy of the Everything Search Engine. Sorry Mac users, it only works on Windows machines. And it’s FREE!

What it does it quickly index all the names of all the files and folders on your machine and let you search by any part of any name in any order. Then it pops up the results. And damn is it fast.

Suppose I want to find a presentation I did last July and I don’t really remember where I put it or exactly what I called it but I know I named it something with the date and it was a PowerPoint, but I don’t know if it was the old (.ppt) format or the newer (.pptx) format. I can just type in “July .ppt” or “.ppt July” or even just “jul” and it finds all files and folders with any of that in the name anywhere.

Everything Changes Everything

So first of all you can stop naming your files with cryptic appreviations. But you probably already knew that. But ever since the days of DOS files have been organized in a hierarchy if you wanted to find them again. Something like:
TAXES
        |__ 2012
        |__ 2013
                |__ Returns
                    |__Corporate
                    |__ Personal
                        |__ 1040.pdf

But since you can search by name it makes more sense to give files better names like 2013 Personal Tax Return 1040.pdf in the above example. That way it’s easier to remember some part of the name when it’s time to search. Plus I can put it anywhere. Kind of like how Google lets you find an email no matter what label you gave it.

Just Set it And Forget it!

You can just install it, give it a minute or two to index and go. OR you can tweak it so it only indexes certain drives, or puts its index file in a certain location and you can exclude certain folders so it won’t index your backup folders for example.

But Wait! There’s More!

Here are some of the extra Everything tricks that I use a lot:

Sort by location, date, or size

The list of items in the search return defaults to alphabetical but you can click on a column to sort by location, date or size. This helps when there are lots of files with similar names.

Right Click options

When you right click on a name in the list one choice it gives you is “Open Path” which opens the folder that the file is in. This is handy if you keep related files in the same folder.

Also you can “Copy Full Name to Clipboard.” This copies the entire path (starting with the drive letter) to the clipboard so you can past it into a document or email and find that file again.

Those are the things I use all the time with this software, but it does many more tricks that I haven’t bothered to learn. It’s the first thing I install when I get a new computer. I can’t live without it. Did I mention it’s free? But if you love it half as much as I do, please donate. http://www.voidtools.com/donate/

Great for use in a company where people don’t always save files to the right location.

All my other computers are running XP. This one is my first with Vista (Home Premium) and like I thought I was supposed to, I loaded protection: AVG anti-virus and Zone Alarm. Both free versions. They’d worked well in my history with XP.
Solution:
A shout out to Mark Wasserman of Janus Systems in Branford Connecticut who diagnosed it in ten minutes over the phone. Zone Alarm was the problem.  He says windows firewall is fine for what I do (I don’t spend lots of time online in what he calls dangerous environments – like airports and coffe shops) so I uninstalled Zone Alarms, turned on the windows firewall and am good to go. Mark also said that AVG is fine and virus protection is more important for me.
Bonus – shut down and start up are a lot faster. Also I used to get an error with Firefox. If I shut it down while it was having a problem and tried to restart it without rebooting, it would tell me it couldn’t start because it was already running. This has now gone away.

NOTE: This is a blog about business tips not my cat (or my computer) but I’m posting here because I had the hardest time finding any solution online. I hope that by posting it here the search engine spiders will pick it up and others can be helped. As always there’s a takeaway for business.

Takeaways:

• Technology keeps evolving. (I thought windows firewall was bad and Zone Alarms was almost a reguirement – those may have been true when I learned them but certainly aren’t now). Every company needs a relationship with someone who keeps up with it.
• That person should not be you unless that’s your job or your hobby.
• One size does not fit all – Mark asked me a lot about how I used my computer and would have a different recommendation if I hung out at Starbucks all day. Make sure your tech person understands this.

[tags] Technology, Small Business Computing [/tags]

I’m using it in a feeble attempt to stay on top of all my projects using David Allen’s Getting Things Done method. The Journal lets me set up categories (the tabs you see in the picture) and they can have entries and sub-entries. Did you know it’s not uncommon to have 60 projects a person is dealing with? Makes me feel better.

In the default useage, you have a new entry for each date of your ramblings. But I use that as a kind of scratch pad / TODO list. Then I have a tab for each project. In the project notes, you can do a lot of formatting (outlines, tables etc – in some cases easier than WORD) and you can assign topics to any text or picture you put in the journal. Then you can search by word or by topic. That’s the power.
So scattered about among many projects you have many tasks. Some are assigned to your assistant. You can put them all in a topic and then search by that topic. All the tasks assigned to him from every project show up in the search. All without making a separate list. Followers of the Getting Things Done method (GTD as the cult members call it) will realize you can make a topic for calls, at home, at computer, waiting on, shopping and all the other ways you’d want to catagorize tasks. COOL