Naming Conventions and Version Control

Quick reference

• 00:04 In this lesson, we are going to take a look at naming convections and
• 00:08 version control.
• 00:09 So let's start out with naming conventions.
• 00:12 As I mentioned in the previous lesson, it's really important to try and
• 00:16 standardize your naming conventions wherever possible.
• 00:19 And that is to have a specific way that you not only name your files, but
• 00:24 also a specific way that you name your folders.
• 00:27 Because if we just let everybody name files however they want,
• 00:31 then that can lead to messy files, messy folders, and
• 00:34 it just makes everything a lot harder to find.
• 00:37 So let's take a look at a few examples of what I mean, and I'm going to show you
• 00:41 a couple of little cool tricks when it comes to folder management, and
• 00:44 how you can create very quickly multiple folders.
• 00:47 Now, I'm currently in File Explorer, and maybe in my team, I'm responsible for
• 00:51 managing all of the invoices that come in.
• 00:54 And this is how I currently have my invoice folder structured.
• 00:58 And you can see that this looks pretty neat on first glance.
• 01:01 I have invoices, dash, and then I have the month.
• 01:05 So I have effectively employed a standard naming convention here.
• 01:09 It always is invoices, dash, and then the month.
• 01:13 And I might have these contained within a year folder as well.
• 01:17 Now, looking at the way I have my folders here, is there anything that you can
• 01:21 notice that makes this a little bit harder to find the folder that I'm looking for?
• 01:26 Well, if you said that they weren't listed logically from January to December,
• 01:30 then you would be correct.
• 01:32 Because the default of File Explorer is to list our invoices alphabetically A to Z.
• 01:37 So the first folder that I have is invoices April.
• 01:40 The last one I have is invoices September.
• 01:44 And this is going to be a lot easier for
• 01:46 me to find if I have them organized January to December.
• 01:49 So if I wanted to reorganize these folders and set them up in that way so
• 01:53 they run from January to December, how might I go about this?
• 01:56 Because if I switch around invoices and the month,
• 01:59 it's still going to organize them alphabetically A to Z.
• 02:03 Well this is where you can think about using numbering.
• 02:06 And I do this on all of my folders so
• 02:08 that I have control as to exactly how my folders are ordered in File Explorer.
• 02:14 So what I would do here is I would find the January folder, I would select it.
• 02:19 Remember, you can press F2 to edit the file name.
• 02:22 And what I would do here is I would put a number on the front.
• 02:25 So I'm going to say 01, and hit Enter.
• 02:28 And that's going to jump that straight to the top of the list.
• 02:32 And I would basically do that for all of my folders.
• 02:34 So F2, we're going to add 02 on the beginning here, hit Enter, and
• 02:39 I would carry on doing that until I have all of these folders numbered.
• 02:43 And just like that my folders are now organized exactly the way I need
• 02:47 them to be organized simply by adding those numbers on the beginning.
• 02:51 So think about things like this when you're creating folders in File Explorer
• 02:56 to house your Excel files.
• 02:57 Let's take a look at another example.
• 03:00 If we open up invoices for January, you can see that I have a few invoices
• 03:05 in here and none of them have a standard naming convention.
• 03:09 And this is pretty much what I was talking about in that first lesson.
• 03:12 If we have lots of people saving files into this folder, and
• 03:15 people aren't given a standard naming convention,
• 03:18 they can pretty much name the file whatever they want.
• 03:21 And this can lead to confusion, it makes things a lot harder to find.
• 03:25 So you can see for some of these invoices, we have INV, then the number,
• 03:29 then the company.
• 03:30 For some, we have the word invoice, then the number, then the company.
• 03:33 For others, we have the company, the invoice number and
• 03:36 then we even have versions after that.
• 03:38 So to cut down on confusion and just make things a lot easier all round,
• 03:42 pick the way that you want your file to be named.
• 03:45 So maybe this top one here is the naming convention that I want to use, INV,
• 03:50 then the invoice number, and then the company it relates to.
• 03:54 I would go through, and
• 03:56 I would rename all of these invoices to match this particular format.
• 04:00 So now I've renamed my invoices, they just look a lot neater.
• 04:05 Also notice that because of the sorting that I have applied,
• 04:09 it's now organizing them logically as well.
• 04:12 So it's organizing them by the invoice number.
• 04:15 Now, also notice what's happened to the first three invoices in this list.
• 04:20 We have the original invoice, we then have a version 2, which I've named V2,
• 04:25 and then a version 3, which I've named V3.
• 04:28 And this is also something that I would highly encourage that you do.
• 04:31 If you are creating a copy of an original worksheet to work on so you don't
• 04:36 overwrite the original, then make sure you indicate that in the file name.
• 04:41 I've done it here by just adding V2, you could add version 2 or
• 04:44 whatever you want to add, just so
• 04:46 that everybody knows that there are multiple copies of this workbook.
• 04:49 And the latest version is going to be the latest copy.
• 04:53 Now the final little tip that I want to show you when it comes to creating folders
• 04:57 is a really cool little tip.
• 04:59 So let's switch across to Excel.
• 05:01 Now, I'm working in the start file for this lesson.
• 05:03 You can see the name of this file if you want to follow along with me.
• 05:07 Now, notice what I have in here.
• 05:09 I have some clients list it out on the clients tab.
• 05:13 Now, maybe I want to create a folder in File Explorer for each of my clients, and
• 05:18 these are essentially going to house all the documentation,
• 05:21 all the spreadsheets all the material that I create for each of these clients.
• 05:25 Now if you're going to do this manually, this would be quite a slow process.
• 05:29 You're going to have to go to File Explorer, add new folder, name the folder,
• 05:33 and repeat that process for all of the clients that you have.
• 05:37 Now, I only have a few listed here but imagine if you had hundreds.
• 05:40 It might not necessarily even be clients that you want to create folders for,
• 05:44 it could be something entirely different.
• 05:46 But there is a cool little trick that allows you to create all of these folders
• 05:50 extremely quickly.
• 05:52 And I'm really excited to show you it, so let's dive in.
• 05:54 Now the first thing you need to do here is you need to add a blank column to the left
• 05:59 of the data that you want to create the folders for.
• 06:02 Now remember, a quick shortcut for adding a column is Ctrl + Shift +.
• 06:07 Now, it might be Ctrl + on your keyboard.
• 06:09 If you have a US layout keyboard like I do,
• 06:12 where the plus symbol is above the equals, then you need to press Ctrl + Shift +.
• 06:16 And what we're going to do here is next to each of these client names,
• 06:20 we're just going to add MD.
• 06:22 Now, I'm going to copy this down, so Ctrl + Enter will leave me in the same cell and
• 06:28 then I can use my fill handle to copy MD all the way down.
• 06:32 You're probably thinking at this stage, what on earth are you doing?
• 06:35 Well, it gets crazier, because we're now going to open up Notepad.
• 06:39 So now we have our Notepad file,
• 06:41 I'm going to put this in one half of the screen.
• 06:44 And we're going to put our spreadsheet in the other half.
• 06:47 What we want to do is select the client names and
• 06:51 our column that contains MD, press Ctrl+ C to copy and
• 06:54 then we're just going to paste that information into this notepad file.
• 07:00 Now this is the important step.
• 07:01 We're going to go to file, and we're going to save the notepad file into
• 07:05 the folder where we want these client folders to be created.
• 07:09 Now for me,
• 07:10 I'm just going to put it in my GoSkills training folder at the bottom here.
• 07:13 Now, this part of the file name doesn't matter too much.
• 07:15 You could call it clients, you could call it sales, you could call it invoices,
• 07:19 you can call it whatever you like.
• 07:20 But the part that matters is that the file extension that you give it is .bat.
• 07:25 Let's click on Save.
• 07:26 So now if we go back to file explorer where I have all of my invoices, notice at
• 07:30 the bottom, I have clients.bat, and this is really an executable file that's going
• 07:35 to run some code which will automatically create all of these folders for you.
• 07:39 So let's double click to run clients.bat.
• 07:43 It's going to go away and execute that.
• 07:45 And what you should find is that a folder has now been created for
• 07:49 each of those client names.
• 07:51 I will say it is worth noting here that if you have two words in the company name or
• 07:55 whatever you're creating folders for, separate them with an underscore,
• 07:59 because if it has a space,
• 08:01 then this little program will create two separate folders for each word.
• 08:05 And of course, if I had a standard naming convention that I was using for
• 08:08 these clients, I could just make sure that I include that in the Excel spreadsheet
• 08:12 before I create these folders.
• 08:14 So those are some tips on how you can standardize your naming
• 08:18 conventions to make things a lot easier to find, version control, and
• 08:23 how you can create multiple folders.

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