Organizing My Files And Personal Stuff

[happyjune]

I presume this is the best place to ask. For the last couple of years, I have been very lazy and have not organized my information on my computers. It is not biz stuff or any thing, but I have thousands of pics, that the file name is still the one I named it when downloading the SD card, I typically do this once a week. Basically, most of my "notes" about people and their phone number and stuff if they send it to me, is still in the original email. Sometimes I get important information to my life by email. I have 100 drafts in the email program with notes, eg, if I see a useful comment on Thai Visa I may copy it and paste it in to a blank message and just keep in the drafts, !!! Logins and PW's are all over the place, everything else is saved in My Docs, sounds kind of pathetic doesn't it. I am using Win 7 Pro. I have had my address book exploited when using a MS office application. It is time to clean my mess up and keep it organised. I have spent today, starting to go through thousands of emails in my inbox , Oh joy it is. I started pasting things into a document, and putting them into files, but it really is very clumsy.

Does anyone have suggestions with tricks of the trade? I am not on ADSL, so a cloud is out of the question for 6 months anyway.

Thanks

[BB1950]

Do you have Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010?

I found the Micosoft OneNote application (especially OneNote 2010) to be a pure joy for managing notes. Makes it so quick and easy to find what I want and paste it into a document. Data is organized by notebooks, tabs, and pages. Not files and folders. However you can paste a file to a page if you want. It is easy to move or copy notes, pages, and tabs between different notebooks, tabs, or pages.

No need to open folders and files to locate that text you want.

If I copy and paste something from a Web page automatically makes a link to the source page.

Tabs can be password protected for security.

The search function really works well at helping me find that lost note. It has an OCR capability to index text within an image for searching.

As far as managing photos, I find Google's Picasa to be very good for that.

It automatically locates all images and photos into a thumbnail library that is very quick and easy to scroll through. It has face recognition to index photos containing a person. You just click on a name to find all photos that person is in. You can touch up, edit, print, upload, or email photos from within it. You can also move photos to different folders on you system.You don't deal with clumsy file names.

My documents folder is no longer cluttered! Before it was a real mess with a 10 year old hodge podge collection ot little bits of this and that.

Edited June 16, 2011 by BB1950

[happyjune]

Thanks BB1950, This is the sort of information I am after. Yep, I in the hodge podge club for sure at the moment. !

I don't have Office, I don't see the need to buy it with Open Office out there, and I am keeping pirated software off my machine now after nasty issues with that in the past.

Thanks heaps for the tip.