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Large Folder structure and File management


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Hi -

 

I often have to wrangle large amounts of files for my job.  The file types are mostly Office file types, JPGs, and PDFs but can be anything really.  I'm not able to move files from their original location and something the filenames make no sense what-so-ever.  Duplicates are often a problem as a client will send the same thing twice and the receiver of those files (as a matter of record keeping) isn't really required to check for duplicates.  Anyway, the complexities are in the folder structure and I need to just deal with them.

 

What I do is review and summarizing everything.  So far my best approach to this problem is that I've developed an Excel spreadsheet that is loaded from a flat-line view of the folder structure (simply by running a dir with some switches and outputting that to a txt file).  I've developed an excel code snippet that then creates hyperlinks to all the files for quick easy access.  The Table features in Excel help me with all my filter needs.  So I can filter based on file type.  I can add a "Duplicate?" column and quickly check things that I've identified as being duplicate and make them go away.  Excel gives me a lot of flexibility in the way that I can easily add columns that are meaningful and useful for going through files (sometimes 1000's of files).  Essentially it is a bunch of file meta tags that I'm using Excel columns for.

 

It works well.  But when new files are added its a pain to get them in my spreadsheet as right now it would be a manual process.  I'm about to dive into some VBA macro development to see if I can solve that by writing something that will automatically create my excel spreadsheet as I need it and add missing files as they are added... but before I do that, I was wondering if anyone else had any recommendations for a solution to this.

 

Thanks,

Shad

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Windows Command line can do that, Pipe to a text file.

 

There is a program called Treesize Pro that was good. I don't know if it is now. 

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Windows Command line can do that, Pipe to a text file.

 

There is a program called Treesize Pro that was good. I don't know if it is now. 

 

Thanks for your reply.  I've been using the command line for that very purpose (as I described in my OP), but the problem is adding any new files to my list that may have been added in the directory structure.  Perhaps there is an easy way to just compare the two and show differences and feed that into Excel.... at this point I'm looking for something more graceful.  My absolute dream is to have my custom Excel file setup such that I just drop "index.xlsm" into any folder, open it and maybe have to hit "refresh" and it will magically load the files in its folder and all sub folders after it into its table for me to begin working on.

 

Treesize Pro looks like it may work to identify duplicates but it doesn't seem to be flexible in the way of adding my own custom fields for files to track and to later filter by.  For example, I might want a field called "Important" or another field called "Used in Report".  Treesize pro is focused on disk management.  I'm interested in a flat list of all my files with the ability to quickly add information about the file, filter by that information, and easily open the file to see what is inside.

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