Storing different file types together

Hi all,

I seem to be asking more questions these days than answering. Better redress that.

Anyway, I'm investigating the feasibility of going down the paperless office route and got some great replies to my earlier scanner query. It turns out that the amounts of paper in my office are small enough that my PC with 160GB hard drive and an external back-up drive at 160GB will be more than adequate.

Next up is an administrative type query. I'd like to be able to store all e-mails, Word documents, Excel files and scanned documents (TIF files I think) for the one client together so that I have the one folder for each client which has all correspondence stored in together in it, in chronological order, whether that correspondence is e-mail, a Word document from me, scanned paper etc.

Is this possible using MS Office, as I do, or do I need to get some other form of storage/archiving software?

Thanks.

I don't see what MS Office has to do with this. You just need to create the required folder hierarchy using Windows Explorer and store the files for each client in each client specific folder.

A desktop search feature like Copernic might help when locating information in such a folder arrangement. Vista has its own desktop searching built in.

Thanks Clubman.

My only irritation with that method is that in order to copy e-mails to a standard Windows Explorer folder, I have to save a copy of each e-mail individually. Currently, in Outlook I have folders for each client and file each e-mail into a folder named, for example, ClubMan. I then have a neat chronological record of e-mail correspondence, which is very easy to maintain.

But what would be really useful would be a facility to occasionally copy the contents of the entire ClubMan Outlook folder into my overall Windows Explorer folder for client ClubMan where all the e-mails can be kept together and opened again in Outlook as the need arises.

Any suggestions?

What about using Outlook as the storage application and then just dragging and dropping any external (non email) files associated with an individual into that individual's Outlook folder? Would that work?

Er...I don't know how to save an external file, e.g. .DOC, .PDF into Outlook.

I find it a bit weird that MS Word, Excel and Adobe Acrobat all use the same basic file storage layout, so it's simple to save files of any of those types into the one folder, but Outlook is in a world of it's own.

Marianne said:

Er...I don't know how to save an external file, e.g. .DOC, .PDF into Outlook.

Click to expand...

I just tried dragging and dropping one from Windows Explorer into an Outlook folder and it seemed to work. I'm not sure if this links to the original doc on disk or if it copies the file into Outlook's message store.

I find it a bit weird that MS Word, Excel and Adobe Acrobat all use the same basic file storage layout, so it's simple to save files of any of those types into the one folder, but Outlook is in a world of it's own.

Click to expand...

That's because Outlook is (among other things) an email client so has its own way of storing files (usually emails).

ClubMan - you're a genius. (Or maybe I'm a bit dim, but I choose to believe the former.)

I just dragged a file from Word and dropped it into an Outlook folder where it sat happily.

Check out if that makes a link to the original file or if it copies it resulting in two copies - your original and your Outlook copy which may not be what you want or may mean taking care to deal with the appropriate one. I think it may create a link to the original file on your normal filesystem. Try editing the original and then seeing if the edits are present if you access the file from Outlook. Copernic is very handy for searching Outlook and other sources (e.g. your nomal filesystem) for emails/files. Much better/faster than the Outlook or Windows (not Vista) search tools.

Just found [broken link removed] which is in line with my suggestion. Perhaps there is more info out there on using Outlook in this way - including some analysis of the pros and cons...?