Boring? Perhaps. Useful? Extremely.

Saving & Storing

Documents can be stored internally in, for example, the computers hard drive. But documents can also be stored externally. Traditionally, this was on a memory stick, an external hard drive, a CD, a video even. But more and more, files are stored on what is called The Cloud.

You most likely have heard of The Cloud. But what is it exactly? Is it a floating cluster of vaporised air? No. That’s, a cloud. The Cloud could be described as another form of external storage, that has seemingly endless storage space, from 2GB right up to 2,000,000 GB. And more.

File naming

It is very very very useful to structure and save your documents in a readable and navigable way. To list a few, here are some important things to bear in mind when thinking about file naming:
– Capital Letters – E.g DocumentOne
– No special characters – E.g Document#One
– Dating – E.g DocumentOne1997
– Underscores for spaces – E.g Document_One
If you do these things when saving files, you’ll find that it is much easier to retrieve certain documents when you need to. It saves a lot of frustration and aggravation.

File formats

Different file formats are appropriate at different times. PNG’s are great as they can maintain transparency, so if you wanted to place a company logo onto a letter you might find PNG useful. Jpegs are great for sending and sharing pictures online and in print, as long as you don’t need them in high quality. They compress the file, at the cost of quality, but this makes them much more manageable files to use. PDF’s, (Portable Document Format) are the most popular file format for sharing documents such as letters, terms and conditions, and even artwork. This is because they can maintain high-quality, and incorporate fonts and images. They can also been created as an interactive PDF, which is great for using hyperlinks, buttons and QR codes.