By default, when you install, there's a preset path, and it tends to go fine. It just installs in that location unless there's something wrong with your computer setup and and your computer doesn't have access to that location. What the a more common cause of a path issue would be if you've got it running already and then you install another computer in the same office and and you don't quite get the path, to match between the two computers. It's important that they both use the same PaaS. And then you fix one and go back to the other and something has changed and so you can get into some problems. So let's talk about the PaaS in general.

When you install the first time, you don't even have to worry about the path. It will just choose one for you, and I'll show you where that is.

Here under options, you click path.

This is the default location. It installs, into what's called your profile area in Windows. That means in the e users and then your name folder. Under that folder, it goes a little deeper to a particular area where it sets up a place for the form tool file. If I just copy that path, I'm gonna select that whole path and press c to copy it, then I can go look at that location, and I can see the files that the form tool and dot sera are putting there. I'm gonna paste that path that I just copied into my address bar here and press enter to browse to that location.

And here's all the information that has accumulated. When you first start, there won't be this much information in here. There will be just a few items.

But, over time, more and more information will be stored here.

And since you guys are likely advanced users tend to tune into, our learning curve session, let's go ahead and just take a tour of this.

If you save answer files, they're stored here in the answers folder, and There's something very interesting in here that I don't know that we've ever mentioned before. I open this up, you can see that it's got some strange files in here with a tilde in front.

And then once we get past those, here's our actual answer files that have been saved.

So what's the deal with these tilde files? What happens is every time you, overwrite your answers, maybe you save some answers initially, and then the following week you add more information and save to the same answer file. Every time you do that, the form tool keeps a a history, a record, a backup of the previous answer file, and they stack up in here. That's so that if you accidentally overwrite some valuable information when you're saving answer files, you can go back and recover it. You can come into here and just rename one of these backup files to get access to it again. When you rename it, you'll just wanna get rid of the tilde on the front and then name it whatever you like.

And the the file names here have the date embedded in it, so you can see when each one of these backup files was created.

So it's kind of a a nifty little undocumented behind the scenes thing going on that, lets you recover data in an emergency.

Going back up a level, the data folder, only appears in Boxeride b b installations.

That's where it keeps track of your various data sources. I've got five different data sources.

Folios is where it stores your folios. It keeps two files for each folio.

Master list, similar thing, keeps, one file for each master list you've created.

Sets, it keeps one file for each form set that you've created.

Tables, was the old name for questionnaires, is why it says tables.

And so if you look in there, you'll see any questionnaires that you have saved, two files for each one of those.

Wrappers, if you used our relatively new wrappers feature, that's where you'll find those.

And then some administrative files, this is where it keeps track of what holiday holidays you have indicated count as holidays for date calculations.

If you bought any of the intelligent form packs, their licenses are stored here. This one, I'll go into a little bit because it's related to the initial question about paths.

See if there's anything else I wanna cover before we get into that. It's track of who's using the form tool here, some overall administrative settings stored here.

But this oh, and that's who's using it again. This one is interesting, though.

I know that I've got let's just open this up.

This keeps track of locations you have created. This is a Docsera only feature.

If you're using form sets, then you've heard the term locations before. Locations are places where you're letting the the Docsera know you store forms in these places. And in here, I've got two locations. And since we're talking about paths, this is worth looking at because there's two paths here. My first location is named BL forms, and it is looking at that path.

That path does doesn't exist any longer.

Whenever I created this location, it did exist, but it doesn't exist anymore. And that can lead to one sort of path problem, which I'll show you right now. If I go into my forms I'm sorry. My form set screen let's close this.

Start a new document and click the start button to go into my form set screen. See this message? This folder is missing. See user Scott desktop BL forms.

That is not gonna kill me. I can still choose another form set, but that particular form set is missing. So this little error message is gonna pop up each time I come into this stream.

BL happens to be alphabetically at the top of the list, and so that's the one it wants to look at, and so it generates this error message. That's not gonna stop me from getting my work done because I can just click okay and continue on, but it would be nice if that error message didn't pop up. I can fix it in one of two ways. I can, second error message there, I can, either go into my form set editing screen and remove the location there. Actually, let's do that. Let's I'm trying to decide if I wanna show you both ways or one way.

Well, since we got into this folder already, let's show it to you there, and then I'll go back and show you the other way. I could just go directly into my locations file, if I'm a real unique peptide and just delete that, form set name and location from the file, and then it'll no longer pop up as an error. Or maybe I wanna fix it instead. Maybe I want to change this path to the location where it actually does exist. I could fix it that way. Or now let's do it through the interface.

Based out of that, I can go into the set screen where it's giving you me the error message, and I can go into edit a set. It doesn't really matter which set. Whichever set I'm editing, I get access to my locations screen here. And here, this one, the BL forms is the one that's bad. I can either remove BL forms set entirely by clicking the red x, or by clicking this button on the right, I can change the folder for that location if it's just been moved somewhere.

That would be the thing to do if you've moved the folder where you keep your forms.

But if it no longer exists, then go ahead and just delete it.

My other location here named my form does exist. That's at the see my forms location.

And because it's seeing a form there, I know that that location actually does exist. But this first location doesn't exist anymore, so it'd be good to get rid of it get rid of that path error.

Another way that paths become important is if you decide to change your path. So remember I said that this path is the default path, and it's located right here on my c drive on my local computer. If you're in an office and you want to share your answer files with other people in the office, you wanna share your form sets, your master list, your folios, all that good stuff, isn't just for you, you want it to be shared by everyone in your office, then you need to change this path to a network location, a shared network folder that everyone has access to.

This computer I'm using right here is not a network computer, so I can't show you exactly where you would put it. But on you know, ask your network administrator where would be a good place on the network where all of us can share this information.

Then whatever that location is, type it in here or browse to it, and that will change it. Then you need to change that path for all of the people in your office. You can't just change it for yourself.

Otherwise, you'll be using that location, and then everyone else will still be using their local c drive. So you need to go around to each computer and change the path there, making sure to match that location.

As you're doing that, if you've done this before, this will be familiar.

When you change the path, it asks you during the process, do you want to copy the files from your old path to your new path? That means all those files we were looking at, if I've already created some master list, portfolios, and answer files while I had it installed here on my local computer, do I want to now copy all of that existing information from my local computer up to the shared network location?

I probably do, and so I'll answer yes.

But then when I go to the next user, I'll get the same question, and maybe they created different answers, different folios, different master list.

At that point, I will probably say no.

Because when I start combining multiple sets of this information, I'll have duplicate.

I'll have, newer, older ones, perhaps overriding newer ones. I'll have a lot of stuff going on that I don't have full control over. So the better approach, if you're gonna be changing paths for multiple computers in an office, is first to choose the person who has done the most work in the form tool, has created the most master list and folios and answers and so forth, and, change the path for them first. And tell it, yes. Please copy all of this information from the local computer up to the new shared location.

That gives you a good base set of all that information.

Then in, change the path for all the other users and tell it, no.

Do not copy the local information up because you'll start getting into conflicts and overlaps.

And, do that for all of the other users. And then if you find that perhaps, one of the users says, hey. I used to have this great folio.

It's gone now.

Then on a piecemeal basis, you can go to that particular user's old folder here.

You'll find it in this location into the folios, and just find the files that are missing. Folios have three files associated. If they if they say, you know, this Acme products folio is really great, I wanna have that, you can just copy those three files and put them in the corresponding folio full folios folder up on your new shared location so that they have access to them.

Or maybe one of your users says, hey. This master list, I just modified this master list last week, but now, the modifications I made have been lost now that we're all using the shared location.

Well, that's because that particular user made made some more recent modifications to master list. If you wanna use that user's master list instead of the one that you did copy up to the shared location, just go to that user's folder, this folder here, into the master list area here, Find the one they're talking about. Copy that and put it up in the shared location instead.

So you see what I mean? The idea is you get the bulk of the your information copied up to the shared location, and then you go around piecemeal. And if there's anything else that needs to be added, you can do that one at a time. What we see happen sometimes is someone will have, changed their path here to a shared network location, and that's great. That's that's the location where the form tool or docs are are is going to save all of its own internal files, sort of administrative files.

And then when they create a form, here's my form, and they go to save their form, they think, oh, yeah. I'm supposed to save this in that special shared location.

That is not true, and it can lead to, well, worst case scenario, it can break things. That doesn't happen very often. What usually happens though, it just leads to a mishmash of files that makes it difficult to find your forms, and and and difficult especially to create text properly.

So when you create a form and choose file save as, do not save it in the form tool folder.

Save it wherever you like to save forms. Save it probably wherever you've been saving forms all along.

If it's important for you to distinguish forms that have been converted with the form tool from old forms that you used in the past, then just rename your old location old forms and start a new location named forms or named, TFT forms or docs forms, that's fine. But do not save your forms amongst the administrative files that are in this location.

If you're in there where you see the the data folder and the answers folder and the form tool dot any file and all that technical stuff, that's not where you should be saving your forms. No reason to change your form location from where it is right now. Go ahead and continue saving your forms where you always have.

If you're using Dropbox, you might be tempted to make Dropbox the location Dropbox or any other cloud based, file system.

You might be tempted to make your Dropbox folder, this location so that all of those files, will be up in the cloud.

That's, a reasonable approach, but you have to be careful of one thing. By default, Dropbox in particular, and I'm guessing others as well I think I have Dropbox installed on this computer. Let's see.

Yeah.

I'm gonna go into please re I haven't used Dropbox here for a while. If you go into your Dropbox configuration screen, I'm gonna click this options button here getting to my preferences.

One of the items you'll find in your configuration for Dropbox or for any any other one of these systems is the local location Find where it is.

I'm not seeing it here.

Let me go back in.

And then you again, options up to date.

Oh, oh, it's probably this.

Open Dropbox folder.

Oh, this one I've already done.

The location of the Dropbox folder, this one I've already changed to c Dropbox.

By default though, when you first install Dropbox, that location is c users, your username, app data, local, Dropbox, something like that. The point is the path that Dropbox uses embeds your username within it.

That means the path to your Dropbox folder is different than the path that everyone else uses to their Dropbox folder. If you want Dropbox to be the location for information that you share with everyone else, you need to make sure the path that Dropbox uses locally is the same for you as it is for everyone else. So you go into the, Dropbox settings, which I'm sorry. I can't find the exact setting for you right now. But you go into the Dropbox settings and change its local storage location to a path that can be the same for everyone on their own Dropbox settings.

So in my case, I've chosen c Dropbox as the location. And then I would go to to Mary's computer, and I'd change her Dropbox location to c Dropbox on her c drive. And I'd go to Fred's computer and do the same there so that everyone has the same path to their local Dropbox folder.

Once you've done that, then you can put the form tools files with by changing the path in this screen, you can change the form tools path to see Dropbox, the form tool, and that path can be identical for you and Mary and John and everyone else in the office, and it'll work beautifully.

It'll save all of your, folios and answer files and so forth to your local Dropbox folder. From there, Dropbox will take care of automatically syncing it up to the cloud and so will everyone else's. And so all of you will be using the cloud location, synced with your local location for the storage of all these shared files, which is just exactly what what you want.