Don’t work too hard organizing your presentation files! Search PowerPoint instead

Here’s an idea to save a lot of time and effort. If you’re like me and many people I know you have a boatload of PowerPoint files that are associated with many different projects or clients – we’re talking information overload! It’s natural to organize these files into some sort of folder hierarchy and use a file naming system; however I’ve found that no matter how many ways I rearrange folders and rename files no arrangement works perfectly. I continually find presentations (or any type of document for that matter) that do not fit cleanly into a given organizational structure. When you find such a document what do you do? I think it’s pretty easy to reach the point of diminishing returns with folder and name-based organization.

Image by http://www.flickr.com/people/rexroof/ used under terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license

My approach, and one of the key motivations behind my Slideboxx PowerPoint search tool, is to let the computer help: I use folders for fairly broad categories of documents and then use desktop search to find my documents. I don’t even bother renaming documents I download from the internet such as PDFs of journal articles – renaming takes valuable time and after time passes the names often are no longer helpful. For text-oriented documents such as Word documents or the PDFs of journal articles traditional search tools such as Microsoft Desktop Search or Google Desktop work well enough; however, it can still take some rooting through the results to find the right document. PowerPoint files are inherently visual so a search tool such as Slideboxx that shows thumbnails of the specific slides makes finding the right slide a lot easier.

This is not a particularly new idea, but I think it bears repeating periodically especially around the New Year when every store has organizational aids for sale! I think the idea reflects the Google approach to the web: could you imagine trying to categorize and organize all the web content?!? Well that’s how Yahoo started, Yahoo is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle”. The Google approach of indexing everything and letting people search it all was very disruptive to say the least, well that and the way they figured out how to monetize search with ads.

So that’s the idea to save some time and effort: use a broader folder structure along with a search tool to find your documents. We often end up spending too much time and effort maintaining our “systems” rather than making our systems work for us or seeking out new tools or methods to make our systems work better. What do you think? is it worth trying? Slideboxx Prime has a free thirty day trial and can work with whatever folder structure you already have.