Indexing data

Data can be indexed by accessing the 'organize my data' menu from the main menu. The first thing you need to do is open a file. This can be done in several ways. You can either open a previously created file or start with a blank file. When an older database is opened the system starts by checking the consistency of the database. This might take a while if you are loading a database containing many files.

When the database is loaded files can be added by simply selecting them in windows explorer or a similar program and dragging them to the menu. As soon as a file or selection of files (and/or directories) are dropped on the menu the applications starts to find information about the files through several options. The application relies on plug-ins, small separate programs, to find this information. The amount of information found and the time it takes to process depends largely on the plug-ins used. If you want to know what plug-ins the system uses open up the messages window before loading the database. Especially plug-ins that connect to other computers, for instance the google indexing plug-in that is part of the base package, will be active up to a few seconds per file. This makes the indexing process quite slow. It is therefore best to add up to a maximum of tens of files at once. Another reason to not overload the system is that the addition of data entries will take up quite a lot of memory space. As a reference, adding a thousand files can take up approximately 100 mega bytes of main memory. When all files have been added to the database make sure you save the file before exiting the menu, otherwise all new information will be lost.