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Organizational Choices

Posted on: Saturday 12/30, 2006;  6:51 PM

There are quite a few ways that you can organize your Mathematica projects in A WorkLife FrameWork.  One of these is what you encounter the first time you use the package.  When you create a Diary in a directory—if one has not already been created there—a set of sub directories are automatically created for your Notebooks, Packages, Databases, Blogs, and other non-Mathematica files.  The contents of these directories are easily accessed through their corresponding Palettes in  A WorkLife FrameWork. Any number of Diaries can be placed in a given Diary directory.   In this organizational approach the files you are interested in are associated with one another by direct proximity in your computer's file system.

But it will often be the case that you will want to, for example, associate Diaries with one another that are in different Diary directories.  And the same is true for Notebooks.  This is a looser association which is not directly related to your file system's hierarchical tree structure.  For example you might want to associate a Diary that you use to keep track of ideas, computations, communications, and other items having to do with a particular person (for example, someone that you advise in a technical management capacity)  with other Diaries that have to do with projects that involve that person.  In A WorkLife FrameWork this sort of thing is done with Organizations. It allows you to create sets of Diaries and associated set of Notebooks that are located in arbitrary places in your system's file system.

A third organizational method—or more generally a method for designing sets of notebooks, files from other programs, and content on the internet—is the use, in  A WorkLife FrameWork of FileSets. In the documentation for A WorkLife FrameWork FileSets are described in the description of the functionality of the Additional Tools Palette.  In short though a file set in A WorkLife FrameWork is a way to group together pointers to any file on your system, and any location on the internet.  When you create and then open a FileSet, all of the files in that FileSet are opened in their respective default applications and all internet locations are opened in their default applications (usually your browser).

In the morning, for example, I generally open my morning news FileSet, which opens the web sites that I like to check for news in the morning.  I also use FileSets often for organizing and referring to sets of resources that I need for a given project.  But, the use of FileSets is something that—like many of the tools in A WorkLife FrameWork—can be used in a very plastic and creative fashion in your work.  

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