04_Housekeeping_2016.pdf

Unit 4: Housekeeping*2010 material* 4.0 Introduction This unit is about good practice in managing Excel files. The measures below will either save you time or make your work more secure. 4.1 Naming files Why is this important? In general, very little thought goes into the naming of files. We can think of three reasons for this: users think their job is done inside the file; the practice of good file-naming is rarely taught or even encouraged; and “Book 1” will usually suffice for short-term purposes. But adopting a system of file-naming comes with the following advantages:  Users are better able to find files  It is obvious what the latest version of a file is  Files are less easily lost  Users will appear (and be !) better organised to colleagues, bosses, clients, etc. Designing your system Here are some tips:  Name. Don’t be lazy and just call the file “Accounts” just because there is accounts information in it! Take a moment to think about what uniquely identifies the file which might be that it is a summary of commissions of sales team A in 2009. In which case ‘09CommissionA’ might suffice  Use YYMMDD format eg “100120 MyNewFile”. The YYMMDD serves the purpose of ordering your files within a folder (Right click Arrange Icons By Name) by the date in which you created them which is often useful for identifying a particular file . It also makes it clear which the latest version of a file is when there is more than one.  Length. Try to keep the name to a few words. If you display your files as tiles (default), the first 25 characters only are displayed. If you need more than that, you’re probably not thinking hard enough about what the file really is. One of the problems with long file names is that they are harder to distinguish. (Furthermore, very long file names may be seriously problema