Organise and keep track of files with filters, labels and star ratings

Launch a web browser of choice and go to the Nemo Documents website. When the page loads, click the large, green Free download button. If the File Download Security Warning dialogue box appears, click Save and choose a location for the downloaded file. Firefox users should select Save File to save the download to Firefox’s default download folder. Now locate and double-click the downloaded file (called ‘setup.exe’) and follow the prompts to install Nemo Documents. When the installation is done, click Finish.

The program will launch automatically and place a little blue ball icon in the Notification Area at the right-hand side of the Taskbar. Double-click this icon and the program window will open to show an empty calendar screen set to display the current week. Nemo Documents (hereafter referred to as Nemo) needs to index your files and folders before it can display any information so at this stage, click the OK button and then let it do its stuff.

When Nemo’s finished, the ‘indexing’ message will disappear from the program window’s title bar and you will see a screen a bit like this. By default, Nemo shows popular file types as it comes across them – here Word documents, PDFs, images and ZIP files are displayed. More file types will appear as they are indexed. Each day is divided into morning, afternoon and evening, with the files opened at each point in the day displayed in their relevant sections. Click the Month tab to try a different view.

Notice that each file type sits under a heading (such as ‘Images’ or ‘Documents’) with a little down-pointing arrow next to it – this indicates that the entries beneath belong to that particular document type. Click one to see what’s inside. Collapse open types (by again clicking the little arrows) to see the rest of the document types in the list. In addition, hovering the mouse pointer over any file produces a pop-up window with more information, like this.

The information displayed in the calendar can be filtered in various ways. By default, everything is on show, but particular file types can be filtered in or out by clicking the Types headings in the left-hand panel. Here for example, we have clicked the Images type on the left (it’s highlighted with a horizontal grey bar). So now only images are displayed. It’s also possible to add ‘stars’ to important files by right-clicking them and choosing Star file.

Having starred a file, try clicking on the Starred heading in the left-hand column – and only those files with stars will be displayed. Alternatively, you can add labels to any kind of file. Just click the plus (‘+’) sign next to the Labels heading in the left-hand panel and when the ‘Add new label’ dialogue box appears, type in a descriptive label – we are calling ours ‘Computeractive’ – and then click Add label. If they are needed, you can create more labels in the same way. Click close when you are finished.

With one or more labels created, they can be applied to any document in the calendar. Just right-click a document, choose Labels and select the relevant label from the list. By combining stars, file types, folders and labels you can filter out all the files you don’t want to see so that you can concentrate on the ones you do. Here, for instance, we are displaying only those Word documents that have the Computeractive label – everything else is hidden.

As well as using the week and month views, files can be viewed by year or day, or as a list. The day view is particularly useful on a larger screen, because proper thumbnails of each file can be viewed without having to pass the mouse pointer over them. What’s more, in this view files can be opened by double-clicking them, or ‘starred’ files with a single mouse click.

By default, Nemo indexes all the files in the Documents/My Documents folder, but it’s easy to change this. Click the little ‘+’ button next to Folders in the left-hand panel and when the Settings dialogue box opens, ensure the Folders tab is selected and click the Add folder button. Use the Browse For Folder dialogue box to find the relevant folder to add, click on it once and then click OK. Use this same dialogue to exclude folders from Nemo’s index (just click the Exclude folder button instead).

The Settings dialogue box can also be used to modify the document types that Nemo indexes – click the File types tab to explore these options. But we want to show Google fans one last thing: click the Google tab and fill in your Google username and password, then click Reindex files. Nemo will integrate entries in your Google Calendar and files stored on Google Docs into the main calendar as shown here.