Hey, welcome back. Whether you're organizing your personal data for your own use or organizing project data for work, there are certain procedures you want to follow to make sure your data is easy to find and use. In this video, we'll cover some best organization practices and also check out some different ways project data can be organized. There are plenty of best practices you can use when organizing data, including naming conventions, foldering, and archiving older files. We've talked about file naming before, which is also known as naming conventions. These are consistent guidelines that describe the content, date, or version of a file in its name. Basically, this means you want to use logical and descriptive names for your files to make them easier to find and use. Speaking of easily finding things, organizing your files into folders helps keep project-related files together in one place. This is called foldering. For example, all the files related to your vacation plan might go in the Vacation2025 folder. You might then break that folder down even further by creating subfolders like itinerary or photos, depending on what else you'd like to easily access. It can also be useful to move old projects to a separate location to create an archive and cut down on clutter. It's so much easier to find and use my files when I name them something meaningful and searchable and when I organize them into folders. It makes all my data more accessible and useful. In addition to these three best practices, there are two more things you'll want to consider when organizing data for work use. First, the project data you'll be using for work could be accessed and used by multiple people. It's important to align your naming and storage practices with your team to avoid any confusion. Your team might also develop metadata practices like creating a file that outlines project naming conventions for easy reference. We'll get to talk more about naming conventions for work files in more detail later. Secondly, you want to think about how often you're making copies of data and storing it in different places. Most importantly, because if data is stored in lots of different databases or spreadsheets, it can contradict itself and lead to mistakes later on. Also storing data in multiple places takes up a lot of space. Relational databases can help you avoid data duplication and store your data more efficiently. You can use these practices to organize data in different ways according to your project. Let's look at some examples of data organization. I have some sample project folders here, each organized in a slightly different way. Let's open them up and see what they look like. We'll start with the high-level Finances folder. The Finances folder has been organized categorically. There are subfolders like budget, invoices, and payroll that represent different categories. Let's click on "Invoices" to see what's in there. In the invoices folder, you can see that we have another set of subfolders labeled by year, 2014, 2015.... Looks like these are in chronological order. Sometimes the way files are organized can tell us how the data within those files is also organized. Let's open a file to see if that's right. In the 2014 subfolder, there's a file with invoices from June. If we open it, we can see that they've been organized by date, just like the folders. There's different ways to organize data depending on what you need it for. The categorical organization of the subfolders and finances made it easy for me to go straight to the invoices, but the chronological organization of the invoices subfolder can help us find financial data from the exact date we're looking for. There's other ways to organize data too: in order of importance or even by location. For example, a company might use hierarchical organization so that employee data mirrors the structure of their employee organization. Or a company working with geographical data might choose to organize by location. It's a good idea to take time early on in a project to consider what the best organization methods will be for you and your team to stick to. Here's another way to think about it. Unorganized data is like a messy room. It's overwhelming, hard to find anything in, and gets worse the longer you avoid cleaning it up. But by making sure early on you know where to put your files, you can keep your work data organized, easy to use, and error free. Now that you see how important it is to keep data organized for both personal and work use, we'll take a closer look at file naming conventions and how they carry over into your databases. See you in the next video.
