Filing cabinets in the contemporary office workplace

The humble office filing cabinet rarely attracts a great deal of thought in our busy offices but a quality filing cabinet should give years of problem free usage. Even with the current trend towards the paperless office, filing cabinets remain in great demand as the inescapable fact is that most offices still produce huge quantities of documents that have to be filed away.

Filing cabinets are invariably manufactured from either steel or melamine faced chipboard. Of the two materials frequently used, metal filing cabinets are lighter, stronger, longer lasting and usually come with a manufacturer’s guarantee of between 5 and 15 years depending on the quality of the filing cabinet supplied. Wood filing cabinets are often extremely functional but usually are supplied with a guarantee of 5 years or less.

Filing cabinets are designed to store suspension file folders that hang on runners inside each filing drawer. One key feature to watch out for when choosing a filing cabinet is full drawer extension. This is where the filing drawers are designed to pull out 100% so that the files located at the very back of the drawer are able to be reached without the need to reach back into the cabinet to retrieve files. Another necessary feature is the anti tilt mechanism which operates by stopping more than one drawer being opened at once as the weight of two drawers of files could easily cause a cabinet to tip over. Files should be loaded into the lowest drawers of the filing cabinet initially to aid stability of the cabinet.

There are two standard sizes of suspension file in Europe, foolscap and A4. Foolscap is by far the most popular size used in Britain and Ireland, whereas A4 is the most common size in continental Europe. The runners that support the suspension files are usually built into the top of the drawer sides in a standard filing cabinet so the tab files are usually designed to run from front to back. Some filing cabinets are supplied with fittings to allow either foolscap or A4 sizes to be stored. It is important to note that the drawer bottoms in filing cabinets (and especially in wood filing cabinets) are not usually designed to support great weight and so the filing cabinets must not be used as standard drawers.

Bisley filers are undoubtedly the leading brand for metal filing cabinets and their flagship BS range of cabinets are built to last and are usually supplied with a 10 or 15 year manufacturer’s guarantee. The BS series includes fully welded construction with twin skin drawer fronts. Drawers are mounted on roller ball bearing slides which provide ultra-smooth action and full drawer extension. The Bisley BS range offers two, three, four and five drawer versions and will accept both foolscap and A4 filing. The BS4E 4 drawer filing cabinet gives more than 2 linear meters of suspension file storage.