I’ll expand on my smug tweet earlier regarding the question of putting numbers in file names.
Earlier this week the boss mailed me a couple of old Project schedule files. “Got any later versions of these?”, was the request. The file names included the number: 31.91 [whatever].mpp
. They were last updated in 2017.
We haven’t touched that project in years, but I still have the SharePoint folder bookmarked. So, basically as fast as my hand could move the mouse, I found that folder. (The answer was ‘no’, those were the latest files.)
Now I might have been able to find those files if the numbers hadn’t been in the file name, but for sure it would have taken longer. And now I realise that having the numbers there made me convinced that, were I to look, I would find them. Whereas with no numbers it’s just a lottery and you don’t know when to give up.
Remember, these files are now five years old.
So, for a certain class of files – those that might be shared at work is squarely in that class – I am now convinced that putting the number in the file name is what you should do.
This won’t apply to everything, and I’ll think on this for the next few weeks.
What does everyone else do? Do we have any numbers-in-file-names people here?