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sna
Partner - Contributor III
Partner - Contributor III

Do you use the generic search engine on your OS to find the document you are looking for?  Have you had any luck finding it within one minute?  Well, I haven’t.  So I decided to go back to the old fashion way.  QlikView way.  The associative way. 

Here is my background.  I use Windows, so I search for something like “How QlikTech uses QlikView” in “Search programs and files” box above the “start” button.

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This is where the disaster begins.  It found 1,270 items.  I know I didn’t make that many documents with that name.  What it’s finding is all the files that contain at least one of the key words in the file name, including as an attachment to emails.  It also searches for the content of the document.  It’s overwhelming to find what I am looking for from this long list, but Windows doesn’t give me an option to filter by a document type or by a folder these ppt may belong to. 

I just needed a way to simply find my files in my folder by the name and not the content .  So I created this application called Find My Files.qvw.  If you’d like to try it, download  the app and specify the root directory in the box and hit “Reload” button in QlikView.  If you start with the highest hierarchy directory, it may take longer than expected depending on the number of files you have.  For example, I have 106GB used in my C: drive, and I care about only what’s in my user folder.  So I loaded all the files in that folder, which is 37GB in total.  It took only 1 minute to read in all the files.  If you don’t want to read all the files, you can specify the extensions in the loop such as qvw, xls, xlsx, doc, docx, ppt, pptx etc.  The reload time will be faster, especially if you are reading the entire hard disk.

The script of this app is pretty simple, and it is one of the help sample codes.  Many people may be already familiar with it. 

Using this app, I know there are 18 files in my machine for “Making a good design great” ppt and not 1270.

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Yes, there are various desktop search software available out there, but why is this app any better?  This app also helps you organize your hard drive.  For example, when you are running out of disk space and need to know which folder is consuming the most disk space, you may want to know which folder I can consider eliminating.  Windows Explorer doesn’t give you the folder size, so you need to right click and see the properties to see how large the folder is.  If the folder is 10GB, you sit and wait for the properties box to appear.  Bummer.  Use this application, and you will be more efficient with your work life.

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Download this application and the technical brief from here.

Ho Ho Ho… Happy Holidays to you (belated)!

Shimanta (Shima-Santa)