Posted: September 22nd, 2011 | Author: Christopher Papastefanou | Filed under: Simplicity | Tags: documents, finding, notes, searching, simple, simplicity, sorting, tag, tagging, tags, text | No Comments »
Using tags in for documents is a great way to make them searchable in unorganized piles of documents.
The problem is that different applications store the tags in different metadata formats. The tags in a Word document emailed to you won’t necessarily show up when you search your email.
The solution is ridiculously simple: write the tags in your documents.
Since almost all decent search features support searching inside documents, it will find the words.
Regardless on which platform and in which application the document was created (provided it’s on of the standard text document types) it will searchable in any environment.
When I have a miscellaneous note of some kind, with no obvious place or category, and I’m not sure I’ll find it where I put it – I just add some extra tag words at the end of the document. For clarification and consistency i preface the words with “tags: ”
As with all tags I include related words not in the text already as well as alternate spelling of names.
The documents are in a folder named Notes full of miscellaneous crud.
Posted: September 15th, 2011 | Author: Christopher Papastefanou | Filed under: Productivity, Usability | Tags: documents, microsoft, platform, rich text format, rtf, text | No Comments »
We all run in to problems with certain computers not being able to read the attached Microsoft Word document. Word 98 can’t open Word 2003 documents, Word 2003 can’t open 2007 documents. Word 2010 can’t open Word 5.1 documents and so on.
So what is a good format that all word processors can read?
Rich Text Format – RTF (Developed by Microsoft, ironically).
From Wikipedia:
The Rich Text Format (often abbreviated RTF) is a document file format developed by Microsoft in 1987 for cross-platform document interchange. Most word processors are able to read and write RTF documents.
RTF doesn’t support all features of word processors the most commonly used being tables, images, headers and footers. But more often than you think, you aren’t using any of those features, anyway.
I’ve been in the habit of saving text as RTF 1994, and not once has anyone failed to open the documents. RTF documents created with Word 5.1 for the Mac from 1993 can be opened today with any word processor on any platform I’ve ever tried.
So the next time someone sends you a document with the latest Word 2014 .docxyz format, simply reply:
This file format is not supported by my computer. Please save the document as Rich Text Format (RTF) and resend. That way all recipients can open it. Thank you!