I guess I'm keyed in to a certain method for file naming, descriptions, and other meta data. Sorry, I haven't been totally following the conversation. In either case a single directory is not a great approach as doing so limits you to only one approach to finding files. If searching is the easiest way to find a file, use that. Why not set up your directory structure in such a way that it is also helpful for browsing? So if browsing or familiarity is the easiest way to find a file, use that. Search works on a single directory or hundreds. I'm not married to one or the other approach. I use various searches when it's appropriate or when I think it will be faster. Especially when you're working on "Groups" of files or related files etc. No, I don't use them because it seems way faster to find them by browsing. Typically, for me and places I've worked, directories are used to provide a "Pathway" to the parts with information that is generally easier to remember but rarely any part of the part number.
Literally one or two clicks short of opening the file. By simply clicking on the Saw project folder I can look for "Customer X" and know where my file is. So I might know something is a saw and was for customer X. Our part numbers ONLY contain the project number. Those directories contain the project number, description of the project and customer. I can't imagine professionally curated data where you don't know something about a file that you're looking for. What project is it in, does it have a parent part or assembly, does it show up on another document's where used list.
You must know something about it other than visual. If you don't know a part number, maybe you know a description, even a material. These are the reasons you rely on search. But unless you have a whole lot of homogeneity to your part numbers I think having a single dir would be an absolute nightmare. In fact you can definitely have too many sub dirs. I can see some benefit to having a single or few sub dirs. I think it would also prove to be difficult if you weren't sure what the part number was, IE browsing for a part number or "Something like this".įor me having Sub dirs essentially creates a natural filter. I can get to those part numbers in 2-3 clicks into the right subdirectories. We have part numbers that are 25-30 characters long. Maybe less clicking but way more typing which I think is a whole lot slower than clicking. Scanning "c:\Work\Treehouse Project\Customer inputs" where there may only be 50 files is so much easier.įolder standards really help and PDM can help that with templates. Scanning through a single folder with 20,000 files is exhausting. Browsing, I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, but I'll know it when I see it.Also see search results along with folder paths can help make decisions on whether I got the right file. Folders are somewhat irrelevant although could still be useful to search within a sub-folder structure to minimize search results. Searching, I know what I'm looking for and put in the appropriate search criteria.There are two ways of looking for something, searching and browsing. I'll look them up because now I'm curious. For PDM, I used to have certain rules for creating folders. If you search by typing, a single directory is best. Even if you're searching manually, additional directories just mean more clicking. If you have a search tool, the fewer directories the better.
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