I’ve been working on a lot of data management resources at work recently. At my last position, I was really focused on 3-5 minute videos but I’m currently taken with the concept of 1-2 page data management handouts. I described the first new resource — the project close-out checklist for research data — in a recent post and I’ll also link here to my new DMP resources: an updated DMP checklist, some DMP standard language for my university, and an example DMP.

This post, however, is dedicated to a new worksheet that I’m incredibly excited to share: the file naming convention worksheet. File naming conventions are, hands down, my favorite data management strategy to teach. They are just so simple and so useful and save you so much time later when you try to find files. They’re also vital to success on team projects with shared data.

While I’ve already written about file naming conventions, and blogged about them, and done a video about them, I really like the worksheet format for walking you through all of the steps required to create your own convention. There’s something about the enumerated steps and having a physical takeaway that I hope will be really helpful to people.

As with the close-out checklist, I’ve made the file naming convention worksheet available as a branded pdf and as a generic, editable Microsoft Word file under a CC BY license. Please do share any feedback you have on this document as I’d love to improve it over time to make it really usable for people.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International