Organizing Documents

Question

I’ve got a lot of PDFs/CHMs and they are getting out of control. So I’ve decided to do something about it. First I hit Google and didn’t get very far - the range of programs are very naff. Then I hit metafilter and got a lot more results. From there I learnt there is a lot of programs that do exactly what I want, look stylish and some are even free, but unfortunately they are all written for the Mac, except one that doesn’t do what I want (it does it all online I want it offline).

All I want is a program that you can point at a directory and that will plow through them and list your documents. It can make guesses at content by keyword and the list the abstract (if it has one of course) and allow me to tag it. For instance, does the PDF book Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# belong in Unit Testing folder, the C# folder or the Pragmatic Bookshelf folder? It doesn’t it belongs in all three.

Apparently iTunes does what I want it to, but I don’t want to install a music program to organize my PDF’s - it doesn’t seem right…

Your suggestions?

Answer 1

Could you tell us the ones that are great but are for Mac? That would help us Mac Users out.

Answer 2

I think you need to clarify the question, because I don't understand why not use Google desktop or Microsoft's solutions.

why bother with tag and organize? all you want is to be able to find what you want when you want it. Do you search the internet, or go to that old yahoo "index" ?

Answer 3

I put all my papers in one folder and just use Google Desktop (without sidebar, reporting and all the other crufty features) to index them automatically which works kind of well.

A second method which I will use in conjunction when I start my next project is to use the Firefox plugin Zotero which may help in your case although it is more suited to academic research. It lets you tag and annotate documents as you download them, you can then link to the documents locally.

Both are (beer) free!

Answer 4

I think you need to clarify the question, because I don't understand why not use Google desktop or Microsfot's solutions.

why bother with tag and organize? all you want is to be able to find what you want when you want it. Do you search the internet, or go to that old yahoo "index" ?

Well my resources folder has >5000 items. This is not all PDF and CHM files. There is source code for the books I have in there too as well as a few books in HTML format. The last time I had Google desktop on my machine it ate acres of hard drive space with very little benefit.

Being able to tag and organize is very handy for finding what you want. Why do we tagging here at StackOverflow?

Answer 5

Could you tell us the ones that are great but are for Mac? That would help us Mac Users out.

Where to start? Most of the mac software looks good. Unfortunately the Windows software looks as if it was drawn by a 5 year old with a crayon.

The original metafilter pages are here, here and here. From there you can find links to about 20 applications and a wealth of advice (just like here!)

Answer 6

There are some nice applications out there that can organize, especially academic papers, to create a personal library. Basilic is the one I use at work. It reads bibtex if you use them.

Answer 7

This is what I do:

I create folders in Documents folder functionally:

• Financial
• Financial\Bills
• Financial\Bank Statements
• Financial\Tax
• Ebooks
• Ebooks\Development
• Ebooks\Fiction

And i put files in their respective directories. I generally name them using YYYYMM-FileName.pdf. You don't need to do this - I prefer clean filenames.

Then - If I don't know what I am looking for - I will use Vista's Start Menu search with broad search criteria to look for an item. If I am looking for a credit card bank statement, I will navigate to Financial\Bank Statements folder and then enter the search term in the top right search box. This gives me results faster with narrow focus.

A typical way to look for stuff would be:

1. How much did I spend in Petrol - This search would be done in the vista start menu giving me all documents that has petrol word in it.
2. How much did I earn this year at my company - This search would be done in the Tax folder.
3. Total spend on Mobile - This search would be done in the Bills folder. This should include all bills by all mobile phones in the household.

The initial setup might take time - It took me 3 months to organize 10 years worth of data, but on a weekly basis - I spend 15 minutes scanning and categorizing.

Hope this helps.

Answer 8

This application has just come through as a link on LifeHacker. Looks a bit on the pants side, but I'll check over the weekend to see if does what I need.