Using Tags in Vista

If you have ever navigated through the world of blogs, posted a photo on Flickr or used a social networking site, then you may be familiar with the world of tags. A tag is a small piece of text that lets you identify your post, photo or document with key words that will make it easier for you to find what it is that you need later on. For example, if you were to look at the posting on your favorite blog or website, you may see a listing on either the right or left hand side, in the sidebar, that says ‘Tags' or ‘Keywords.' If you were to click on one of these tags, you would see all of the posts that have been given that tag. Sounds like a cool feature, huh? I bet you are thinking that it would be a great way to find documents on your hard drive if you could tag them and then use a search function of some sort. Well, the people at Microsoft thought that this was a good idea too and they built in into Vista. So today we are going to talk about how to tag your documents.

How to tag your document:

1. Click the Office button (the one that looks like the Windows logo)

2. Select the ‘Save' option.

3. You will see a box labeled ‘Tags.' Click on that box and you should see the cursor.

4. Enter the tags you want to use. You can add just one tag, but to add more than one separate them with a semicolon.

5. Click on ‘Save' to save your document.

See, that was really simple to do! The next question is how you should tag your documents. You want to be able to find them quickly, without having a lot of data to sift though when you do a search, so here is my recommended tagging philosophy.

Step 1: Break it down into document types. Have consistent tags for letters, quarterly reports, and whatever other types of documents that you use on a regular basis.

Step 2: Give each major project its own keyword. Attach it to any document that is about that project in order to find everything at once, just in case you need to provide your boss with all documents related to a single project in a hurry.

Step 3: Tag by month and year. This is a good way to find things from the past in a hurry without having to search each and every document for headers.

If you do this, it means your February financial projections for the new widget project will end up with tags that look like this: "February 2009; Financial Reports; Widget Project." With these tags, you can find your document by searching any single tag, or you can search for all three to find just the document you want (maximum flexibility and maximum specificity).

Now you can go out, enjoy your newfound searches and show your office how amazingly efficient you are.

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