I work as a system administrator in a large private school with hundreds of Macs and PCs. That means plenty of teachers. If there’s one thing teachers ask for, want, and definitely need, it’s a way to handle all the documents that cross their eyeballs each day.
That requires plenty of discipline, a clean Documents folder, or a Mac app which manages documents. We found one that nearly every teacher likes. Except for one nagging but growing problem.
File Me Here. File Me There, Too.
We’ve looked at and tried about a dozen Mac apps which manage documents. Documents?
Yes, documents; files, everything from PDFs to Word files to Excel spreadsheets to photos and graphics, snippets, email, notes and everything in between.
EagleFiler is one we’ve tried and like. It imports and views almost every kind of file teachers or students run into.
It imports web pages, PDFs, RTF files, photos, Safari web archives, email, images, and everything else with a click, keystrokes, or drag and drop.
Once imported, EagleFiler makes it easy to find anything among tens of thousands of items with a nearly instant search, and Quick Look. Press the space bar and see what’s inside the file.
The interface is familiar to anyone who’s used iTunes or iPhoto. Toolbar at the top for basic options, Library items in the left Sidebar, details onscreen in front.
Email messages can be archived into EagleFiler, so we like to think of it as a digital filing cabinet. Each Mac user can organize their own cabinet of folders.
Each file can be tagged and hold notes. Multiple Libraries are allowed and can be stored anywhere on the Mac or the local network. Files can be encrypted for security.
For long term use, EagleFiler doesn’t use a proprietary storage format, so any Mac app can access regular files and folders. That also means the Libraries can become rather large.
Text files (and RTF files) can be edited in EagleFiler’s mini word processor. This is one very sweet Mac app that any organization of Mac users will love. It’s easy to backup files to a network server for redundancy. It’s simple to learn to use.
What’s wrong with EagleFiler? It’s on the Mac. Teachers these days also have iPhones and iPads and they want information to be everywhere at the same time. EagleFiler is an app that cries out for an iOS version. But, if you’re married to your Mac, you’ll love it.
About Natalia Nowak
After looking at all the alternatives, I got EagleFiler as well and love it. The nice thing about using native file formats is that you can share key documents via DropBox, etc, which helps helps with the lack of an iOS version.
There are many good programs in this space, including Together and Yojimbo, both superbly done. They’re all priced similarly, but EagleFiler is easier to manage and find files for other apps, so you’re not stuck if the app goes belly up.
JournalX is also an excellent application for this purpose.