I am using Eaglefiler to store many bills, statements, invoices, etc. I am naming them as “Company short name space MO-DA-YR space type of record.” As an example, a phone company bill may be titled “ATT 02-15-12 bill.” After importing, I usually also manually tag each file with a company name tag, a year tag, and a month tag. If the format of the date is consistent among records, there ought to be an automatic way to do this. Can you help? Do I need to write an AppleScript or can this type of feature (which would likely be useful to others also) be incorporated into EF. I tried to do something like this using a Smart Folder, but couldn’t get it to actually tag anything. Thanks.
What are the tags that you would use for that example filename?
This could be done via AppleScript. However, the fact that the tags can be inferred from the filename (and/or file date) makes me wonder whether you’d be better off using smart folders to browse these documents. Are there reasons that you prefer to use tags?
Reply to Wanted: Method to auto-set date tags for records
I have year tags (2007, 2008, 2009, et al) and month tags (jan, feb, mar, et al) and company tags (att, comed, gas, hanover). I also may tag the bills if there is something else of interest (pd or unpd, for example). I have decided to manually file all the bills in individual company folder also. This way, I can find all my ATT bills at once or I can find all my bills in jan 2009 at once. I did toy with smart folders initially, but I think that I would have too many to be useful; also, using tags always more immediate flexibility. I also like the ability to nest folders and tags (as I will eventually have about 25-45 companies; I haven’t yet figured out how nesting is done). To sum, some tags can be inferred fr the file name, but not all.
Here’s a script that will tag the selected files with the month and year. If you also want a tag for the company, remove the “–” at the beginning of the “copy” line.
I updated the script with some new options, which you can control by changing “false” to “true”:
set _addCompanyTag to false
set _replaceExistingTags to false
set _moveToCompanyFolder to false