TFN#51: 🪜Rename 100 files for 100 team members under a second

I should have shared this letter last week, immediately after Do you right-click to rename? Seriously!?. But no problem, better late than never.

In that letter, we talked about using the F2 function key on your keyboard to rename files in day-to-day work. But sometimes, you might need to carry out bulk renaming. Say 100 files or 10000 files. Even F2 won’t help you do that.

So, what to do?

Use a software!
I use a tiny, free software named Advanced Renamer.

It is truly advanced

As the name suggests, Advanced Renamer is truly advanced.
It provides so many options and methods to rename files that you’d be stunned or confused.
But no worries, let’s take a simple example that you’d be able to relate to.

Here’s the situation

Imagine, your organization is running an annual performance review exercise. (I know, I don’t believe in it much as you know, but this is the most relatable example for everyone. By the way, have you read my thoughts about it under Appraisal of appraisals?)

Let’s say, you have finalized a Microsoft Word document that everyone in your organization needs to fill in.

The idea is that everyone will fill in their document and email it to HR. Fair?

To identify the documents easily, you also want to rename all the documents with the employee names.

How should we proceed?

This is the basic idea: We will create 100 copies of the Performance Review Form and keep them in a folder. We will use Advanced Renamer to rename all 100 files by feeding them the employee list.

Step-1: Keep two things ready: 100 copies of the blank performance review forms in a folder and a list of all 100 employees’ names in a CSV file. Don’t know how to save an Excel sheet as a CSV file? Watch this.

Step-2: Open Advanced Renamer. I haven’t updated my software so the screen may look different if you download a fresh copy.

Step-3: Click “Add Method” and choose “New Name”

Step-4: Then under the “Advanced Tags” dropdown, find out and click the CSV option.

Step-5: Now, add the files that we want to rename. Make sure that you choose the options under the “Rename Files” tab.

All files are loaded in the program. Now we need to give the list of names to the program.

Step-6: Choose the following visual cues. You don’t need to change any settings at any point on any screen.

We want to import the names, i.e. data, not files.

This is important. By mistake, I left a few duplicate employee names. Advanced Renamer shows that the “New Filename” will be a duplicate. So, it will not be able to rename those files. I want to continue with the error and we will skip the duplicate names in later steps.

Step-7: Start renaming by clicking the “Start batch” button on the right-side corner.

The following screen asks for confirmation.
It shows that we are using one method, i.e. CSV method to rename 100 files.

As soon as we hit “Start”, the software shows that there are 26 duplicate names, which will create 26 files with duplicate names. It gives us two options:
either stop the whole renaming process or just skip those 26 files and go ahead with renaming the rest of the files.

I chose the latter option.

Step-8: And…Done! It took 1 second to rename the files. Out of 100 files, it skipped 26 erroneous files and renamed the 74 files.

This was the simplest feature of this software

What we just saw was probably the simplest feature of Advanced Renamer. It is full of hundreds of ways to rename, change cases, generate random numbered files, files with specific patterns, specific dates and times…you name it.

Try it, it is fun. And let me know how you liked it.

By the way, what use cases can you think of for this?
Is there any repetitive task that Advanced Renamer can help you with?
​Hit Reply and tell me.

Reads of the week:

This is a sci-fi movie-level story.

Voyager-1, the legend, is back online. It is insane what NASA engineers have accomplished. They identified that one important chip onboard wasn’t working. It had a very important program code to run. But it couldn’t. So, they physically transferred the code to other chips onboard. They broke the complex program down and redistributed it among other functional chips. And that’s how the 46-year-old spacecraft is now online.

Did you know that: it takes 22.5 hours for a radio wave to reach Voyager-1 from Earth? And it takes another 22.5 hours for the radio wave to reach Earth. That means Voyager-1 is almost one lightday away from the Earth. It is approximately 24 billion km away from Earth and still cruising away at a staggering relative velocity of 61,000 kilometres per hour (17 km per second).