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Gathering Related Files, Folders, and Emails into Groups

You can gather all the files, folders, and emails for a project together at one place by adding them to a group, so that you can easily access them quickly whenever you want to work on the project.

Groups are extremely flexible. In fact, the number of ways you can use groups is limited only by your imagination. So instead of talking about specific ways of working with groups, we'll just focus on the main concepts, because that's all you need to know to start working with groups in whatever way you want.

Main Concepts

1. Each file and folder has one and only one location in the file system. You can see where a file or a folder is located using Windows Explorer. However, with groups, a file or a folder can belong to more than one group at the same time. This is useful because often a file or a folder can fit into more than one folder structure.

2. Items are not physically stored within groups. So if you add an item to a group and then delete it from the file system, then that item will be lost even though it belongs to a group. This is important to know!

3. However, this is not true when doing the reverse. Removing files and folders from a group does not remove them from the file system. Also, removing emails from a group does not remove them from Microsoft Outlook. Similarly, removing a group does not delete the actual copy of the items contained within.

One interesting way this property can be used is for implementing a to-do list. You can create a group for today, and then add the files, folders, and emails you plan to work on for the day to the group. After you finish working with an item, remove it from the group (remember, removing an item does not remove its actual physical copy) so that you can see what’s left to do.

4. Groups are also independent of other groups. If you remove an item from a group, it is not removed from the other groups it is in.

5. Groups can be inside other groups, so this gives you the flexibility to make use of hierarchy to organize the items within groups.

Common Tasks

Now, we’ll discuss some common tasks when working with groups.

Adding an Item to a Group

One common task is to add an item that you have found by either searching or browsing in Browse My Computer to a group. To do so, drag the item from the Search pane or Work Organiser to the group inside Work Organiser.

To add an item to a new group instead of an existing group, you have to create the group first:

1. Right click on an existing group and select Create New Group to create a new group within the group that you clicked.

2. Right click on the empty space below the list of groups to create a new group that is not within another group.

Then you can drag and drop the items you want to add into your newly created group.

Viewing Items Contained Inside a Group

Anytime you want to see the items contained inside a group, select the group in Work Organiser.

Removing an Item from a Group

To remove an item from a group, select the item in Work Organiser, then select Remove in the Functions pane.

Removing a Group from Work Organiser

Finally, to remove a group from Work Organiser, right click on it, then select Remove in the context menu.

Note that you can only remove user-created groups; you can’t remove predefined groups like InView and Saved Searches.