I saw a plea for help from a user that was a scary situation that many of us may face at some point. This user had recently started with a company that had “tens of thousands” of CorelDRAW files that were not organized in any way. Finding files was extremely difficult and this user wondered if there were any easier way to find the files needed.

One of the best ways to search CorelDRAW files is the ROMCat utility. Those of you who have purchased one of our CorelDRAW Unleashed books would have had it installed automatically when you installed the book. ROMCat will create a catalog of file names, keywords and notes in the file. It will not catalog the text inside of the file. Unfortunately that is most likely what the user asking the question needed the most. ROMCat is primarily used to search the clip art supplied with CorelDRAW. Yet its most powerful feature is cataloging and searching the files you create.

In the case of the user asking the question, it would be great if there were a time machine to travel back in time. That way the company could have saved the files on disk in some logical fashion. I’ve heard of numerous schemes. I tend to create a folder for each project or client and put all relevant files in that folder. For active projects/clients, there may be sub folders to better organize the files in smaller groups. As this user goes through the process of cleaning up the disorganized mess, they should come up with a scheme of how to put files in a more organized place.

As you create or edit files, make sure to put keywords and/or notes in the files. This is easy found in the Save dialog box in CorelDRAW X3 and earlier. For CorelDRAW X4 and newer, select File | Document Properties to get a dialog box where the information can be entered. Put in as many keywords as possible and as much information as possible in the notes as both of these will be cataloged and searched by ROMCat (or Corel CONNECT). CorelDRAW X3 and lower are limited to no more than five keywords per file. If you are using one of these older versions, this is yet another reason to consider upgrading. With CorelDRAW X4 and X5, you can enter as many keywords as you like. Corel has taken advantage of this by putting keywords in multiple language inside of the clip art files supplied with X4 and X5.

Going back and fixing thousands of old files will take a lot of time. But if you start doing it right today, it will pay off in the future when it does become easier to catalog and search files!