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What's In A Name? (Quite A Lot!)

Information – it’s the lifeblood of any business and is particularly important to Insight teams. However, sometimes finding the right information when we need it quickly can be like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. This particularly applies when there have been several different versions of an electronic file.

The nature of our work means that we are all constantly producing masses of documents. But if you need the final version of a brief, questionnaire or report, do you struggle to identify the right file? And what if you need to find something written by a colleague – are you sure you’ve got the most recent version?
 
This can be a challenge even in the short term, but if you need something from four or five years ago, it can become a nightmare. The only fail-safe solution is to set specific rules for naming documents – and to make sure that they’re enforced across your whole team. If you don’t, you may find little idiosyncrasies creeping in which will make it more difficult to spot the right document.
 
Purists would go even further, and insist that the final versions are saved as “read only” documents. Some people include the word ‘final’ within the document name. But how often does that version have to change – to become the ‘final final’ or ‘final updated’ file?
 
Finding that final file
More foolproof solutions involve using an agreed naming system for each file. Typical systems include:
 
Version number - v1, v2, etc. However, if several people edit the same version, their changes should all be collated into a new version - otherwise you could have several v2s!
 
The personal touch. Alternatively, you might want to clarify things by adding the initials of the author (e.g. v1 pa and v2 sw).
 
It’s a date! Another solution is to use the date in the file name. If so, it helps to name it in the order year-month-day, so that all the versions are automatically listed sequentially in your electronic files (e.g. 2008-02-28, 2008-03-04).
 
Here are three helpful hints that could make life easier for you: 
  • Include a code for the type of document in your agreed file naming convention (so you can rapidly identify a brief, proposal, questionnaire, topic guide, spreadsheet, table, presentation, summary etc). 
  • Enforce a general tidy-up at the end of a project, and then create a file with all the final documents in it, while it’s all still fresh in your mind.
  • Alternatively, create a master overview document. This can summarise activities and outputs during a project, listing all the important documents and inserting hyperlinks that take you to them. This is particularly helpful when you are trying to find something that someone else managed or something that you did some time ago.
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