How do I use The Paper Tiger to make my life easier? It might be easier to say how I DON’T use the program!
I am half of a business that services the Alberta oil patch, plus I am a farmer, an artist, a sewer, a woodworker, a gardener and a family history researcher. The Paper Tiger helps me with all of these.
For our business: I have a Files database to record where to look for all of our business files; invoices, information articles, etc.
- Vendor company changed its name? Until PT, I never know how to file receipts when a company changed its name. Now I just enter the new name as the file name and the old name goes into the key words.
- If something happens to me, my husband knows where to look for older, archived files, because the summary of the “Old” location tells him to look on the steel shelves in the east basement.
- I have made my work even easier by using the PT file number as part of the company name in my accounting program (“Fas Gas (File 237)”), so that I don’t have to look it up every time I need to file an invoice.
- Wills, passports, etc. are all detailed, so they can be easily found (eg. “Safe in se corner of basement”).
I have separate databases for different types of books and magazines; art, farming, genealogy, gardening, woodworking.
- Each book becomes a “file”, and I create detailed key words for each one (eg. Art database, book Light and Texture in Watercolours, keywords “page 16 watercolour pansies”, Farming database, magazine Western Horseman 2006 June, keywords “page 27 treating laminitis”). And the Location says to look for that type of book on the shelves in my studio, or the big resin shelves in the basement center, etc.
- I store magazines in magazine boxes, so each box becomes a location; Box 01, Box 02, etc. Then the 20 or 25 magazines in each one are labeled with the “file number”, so I have Box 1, book 22. That way they have more tendency to get put back in the correct place, so that they are easy to find.
Fabric, ornamentations and patterns are detailed in a Sewing PT database, so I know where they are stored (Box 1 on steel shelves in basement center, Box 25 in white cabinet on south basement wall). I have to use solid Rubbermaid totes to store my fabrics, because of mice. So without my PT database, I might have to look through every box to find the piece I want.
I am also slowly detailing our huge collection of photographs, by entering keywords such as when the photo was taken, who is in the photo, where it was taken, and other pertinent information.
My biggest limitation with The Paper Tiger is the time to get everything entered into it!
Doreen Neilley
