Love Your Data Week – Day 2

Content adapted from the Love Your Data website.

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It’s Day 2 of Love Your Data Week! Today we’re talking about organizing your data. Having a set file naming and organization system ensures that you’ll always know how and where to find your data. It can be hard to break old habits, but not having to dig through multiple ‘final’ versions of a document will be worth it! Share your organization plan with us on our Twitter or tweet us if you have questions!

 Good Practice

Have a plan for organizing your data. This usually includes a folder structure and file naming scheme (plan). Easier said than done, but check out the tips below!

phd052810s_storyinfilenames

Things to avoid

Source: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1323

phd101212s

Source: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1531

Google “bad file names” and browse through the images for laughs.

Today’s Activity

If you don’t already have a folder structure and/or file naming plan, come up with one and share it. Some good practices for naming files are described below.

  • Be Clear, Concise, Consistent, and Correct
  • Make it meaningful (to you and anyone else who is working on the project)
  • Provide context so it will still be a unique file and people will be able to recognize what it is if moved to another location.
  • For sequential numbering, use leading zeros.
    • For example, a sequence of 1-10 should be numbered 01-10; a sequence of 1-100 should be numbered 001-010-100.
  • Do not use special characters: & , * % # ; * ( ) ! @$ ^ ~ ‘ { } [ ] ? < >
    • Some people like to use a dash ( – ) to separate words
    • Others like to separate words by capitalizing the first letter of each (e.g., DST_FileNamingScheme_20151216)
  • Dates should be formatted like this: YYYYMMDD (e.g., 20150209)
    • Put dates at the beginning or the end of your files, not in the middle, to make it easy to sort files by name
      • OK: DST_FileNamingScheme_20151216
      • OK: 20151216_DST_FileNamingScheme
      • AVOID: DST_20151216_FileNamingScheme
  • Use only one period and before the file extension (e.g., name_paper.doc NOT name.paper.doc OR name_paper..doc)

There are generally two approaches to folder structures. Filing, or using a hierarchical folder structure. The other approach is piling, which relies on fewer folders and uses the search, sort, and tagging functions of your operating system or cloud storage tools like Box.

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