Is your PC a mess? Jane Hoskyn reveals the best free tools to help organise it
Wasn’t technology supposed to make life easier? By this point in the 21st century, we were supposed to have robot servants and automated butlers. Instead, you are a servant to your PC. All those hours spent organising documents, typing emails and trying to keep your head above a messy flood of files. It’s time to ease your workload as we reveal how to make your PC do its own boring chores.
Make your PC organise your files
Organising files and folders is an important job. If you ignore it, your hard drive will end up like a digital skip, and you’ll struggle to find important documents at crucial moments.
Free open-source tool DropIt (www.dropitproject.com) takes the load off your hands and does it very efficiently. Its main function is to automatically move files or folders to a folder of your choice. For example, you can tell it to move any Excel file it finds on your PC to a folder called ‘Spreadsheets’ (or whatever you name it). It can also rename files transferred from your phone or tablet and sort them into an automatically-created folder; compress files or folders into ZIP and other archive formats and then extract them when needed; encrypt and decrypt files that meet certain specifications, and much more besides (click the Features link on the website).
There’s also a DropIt wiki site (www.snipca.com/16577) with articles such as ‘How to Automatically Scan Folders’ and ‘How to Organize Images by Date and Properties’. There are more links down the left-hand side of the wiki’s homepage, including ‘Create lists of files’, ‘Create playlists of mp3’ and ‘Use to send files by mail’. This really is a brilliant tool, and it won’t demand payment at any stage.
To download DropIt, click Download and then click Installer Package or Portable Package. Launch either version and you’ll see a blue arrow icon floating above your open windows. Click and drag the arrow to anywhere on your screen, then right-click it and choose an option to get started. The Profiles option is the most useful. Here, you can organise files, create archives and even make galleries using your photo files. For much more information, see the DropIt Crash Course (www.snipca.com/16579).
Make your PC do the typing
TyperTask (www.snipca.com/16583) is a free, portable tool that types text for you. When you run it, TyperTask automatically enables dozens of keyboard shortcuts for common words and phrases. You hit the shortcut, and TyperTask ‘types’ the full word or phrase. It’s essentially a typing simulator, and could be enormously helpful for anyone whose fingers aren’t as nimble as they used to be.
Click the little ‘Download (53k)’ link next to the second program listed on the page, then run the program. While the program is running (it uses very little memory) its shortcuts work in any program where you can produce text, such as Word, your email program or your browser. For example, if you type hth, the words ‘Hope this helps!’ will be generated on screen. It’s rather disconcerting at first but potentially very useful, especially once you start creating keyboard shortcuts for your address, name and basic email responses.
To see all the shortcut presets and find out how to create your own, click Help in the TyperTask window and then click Help Reference.
Make Office edit your documents
Macros are tiny scripts that do boring and repetitive work for you in Word and Excel (Office 2007 and later). First record yourself doing a certain tedious task – making every other word bold in a long document, for example – and save the recording as a macro. Next time you want to carry out that action, run the macro and the job will be done in no time.
The steps for recording and running a macro are slightly different according to which version of Office you’re running (2010 in our screenshot below), but the basic process is pretty much the same. Microsoft explains how to use macros in Office 2007 (www.snipca.com/16626), 2010 (www.snipca.com/16627) and 2013 (www.snipca.com/ 16628).
If you create lots of macros, give them different names so you’ll know which does what. You can even write your own macro from scratch, but this would require some programming know-how. If you really get into writing automation scripts, look at the free program AutoIt (www.snipca.com/16623), which lets you create scripts for any PC task. You can then convert the scripts into portable EXE files that you can store on a USB stick and run instantly on any computer.
Make your PC save your clippings
Windows Clipboard is one of those built-in tools you take for granted until things go wrong, such as when you accidentally overwrite text by pressing Ctrl+V when you meant to press Ctrl+C, and only realise once you’ve saved the change. That’s it, gone forever – unless you’re using ClipX (www.snipca.com/16650), a simple free tool that lets you access your clipboard history.
ClipX runs quietly in the background, storing all your cuts and copies until you press Ctrl+Shift+V to open your Clipboard history. You Use your arrow keys to select the text or photo you’d copied and overwritten, then press Enter to copy it back to your Clipboard, ready for pasting into any supported program. You can re-copy something you cut or copied to it days or weeks ago, even if you’ve copied many other items since.
Make your PC clean up after itself
You could diligently run CCleaner, AdwCleaner and Defraggler before switching off your PC every night or once a week – or you could let TinyTask (www.snipca.com/16582) do it for you.
This free, portable and tiny (33KB) tool has a program window so small you’ll chuckle the first time you run it, but it’s packed with potential, including the power to automatically run any software on your PC according to settings that you decide. Click the blue button in the middle to start recording actions in any program, then save your resulting macro as an EXE file to run whenever you want.
AUTOMATE YOUR LIFE WITH IFTTT RECIPES
The other tools we’ve mentioned can organise your PC, but only IFTTT (‘If This, Then That’, https://ifttt.com) can organise your entire digital life. Sign up for free, then connect your apps and accounts using ‘recipes’ that automatically carry out an action in response to a certain trigger. Here are 10 of our favourites.
1 Download a random Wikipedia article every day www.snipca.com/16643
2 Get an alert when you switch from Wi-Fi to mobile data www.snipca.com/16648
3 Download Facebook photos you’re tagged in www.snipca.com/16647
4 Get an email when a free ebook is added to Kindle Best Sellers www.snipca.com/16636
5 Find your phone by sending an email to make it ring www.snipca.com/16644
6 Deliver yesterday’s BBC News to your Kindle www.snipca.com/16638
7 Get an alert to cover your plants if frost is forecast www.snipca.com/16641
8 Log all your phone calls in Google Drive www.snipca.com/16645
9 Get an email with today’s sunset time www.snipca.com/16642
10 Save National Geographic’s Photo of the Day’to Dropbox www.snipca.com/16649