Document 'management' question

[NewsGroupQuestion]

Apologies if I am off topic - please say and I will move on.

I have inherited a network environment on which there are many documents,
mostly Word, Excel and Powerpoint that go back many years.

I am trying to come up with a solution where I can produce a library of the
documents, including their date (date time stamp would do), the author and a
small amount of descriptive information.

Does anyone know of a tool that might assist me or do you think it is now a
manual exercise?

Thank you in advance and I emphasise, I sincerely apologise if off topic for
this group.

 

[Jezebel]

There's a little app available free for download from Microsoft that reads
the Document Properties of Office documents. (Can't remember what it's
called, but it shouldn't be hard to find.) This will give you a starting
point. Chances are your users haven't been particularly disciplined about
using these properties, but the dates will certainly be there, and the
titles and authors will often be OK. Sadly, hardly anyone uses the Comments
field, which is the ideal place for the short description.

There are commercial products that do this sort of work, but mostly fairly
expensive and, to my mind, mostly disappointing also.

 

[Jean-Guy Marcil]

Bonjour,

Dans son message, < NewsGroupQuestion > écrivait :
In this message, < NewsGroupQuestion > wrote:

|| Apologies if I am off topic - please say and I will move on.
||
|| I have inherited a network environment on which there are many documents,
|| mostly Word, Excel and Powerpoint that go back many years.
||
|| I am trying to come up with a solution where I can produce a library of
the
|| documents, including their date (date time stamp would do), the author
and a
|| small amount of descriptive information.
||
|| Does anyone know of a tool that might assist me or do you think it is now
a
|| manual exercise?
||
|| Thank you in advance and I emphasise, I sincerely apologise if off topic
for
|| this group.

I think that Jezebek might be referring to
http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;en-us;Q224351

If not, it still will get you more than half way there (Author and Date,
like Jack Nicholson said "Two out of three ain't bad!")! The problem is your
"small amount of descriptive information". I can't think of a way to
automate that, unless all documents have the built-in document property
"Comments" filled in or that "Content" (Which usually holds parts of the
first paragraph) is satisfactory. Of course, if you know for a fact that the
nth paragraph in all documents is descriptive, then you can do something,
but you will have to open each document, which slows down the process (which
you do not need to do with the document properties).

--
Salut!
_______________________________________
Jean-Guy Marcil - Word MVP
(e-mail address removed)
Word MVP site: http://www.word.mvps.org