Re: An Addition to the List

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 2425

Posted by daly_de_gagne
2005-01-03 17:46:08

InfoHandler is a place to keep all kinds of information, from lists to long documents, and be able to instantly access any piece of data you need based on a comprehensive series of categories, clustered into groups (groups of keywords, if you will).

The groups and categories are shown across the bottom of the screen in a series of groups windows. When selecting keywords for a new piece of information, you select the appropriate keywords from these windows, or create new keywords as needed, entering it under the appropriate group.

When it’s time to access information you refer to a similar series of windows across the top of the screen, and click on the appropriate keywords. As well, you can choose to see the keywords groupings in a tree format, which shows the documents for which each keyword has been selected.

I have an ever-growing collection of psychological and general interest references. I can, for example, click Freud, Janet, sexual trauma, and see all articles referring to both Freud and Janet, and dealing with sexual trauma. Other articles where Freud and Janet are mentioned, but not sexual trauma, would not show up.

As well, Infohandler has the usual search features found in program.

No other program I know of has developed a keyword classification and retrival system with the sophistication and ease-of-use that is present in InfoHandler. I estimate that I will have more than 5,000 articles in IH by the end of this year, based on usage so far, and InfoHandler is the only program that has given me the assurance that I can access those articles based on very specific definitions of what I am looking for.

Unfortunately, InfoHandler appears a lot more difficult and intimidating than it actually is. I say unfortunately because I think that many, many more people would use InfoHandler if they actually started to use it.

I am very glad that one evening I took the time to learn how to use it, not by just looking at the directions, but by actually pasting in an article and, learning as I went, setting up groups and categories that would allow me in future to retrieve that article. I found out that doing it with the first article wasn’t so hard, and by the time I finished I had about 10 articles in my infobase, and a set of keywords and groups that became the basis for what I have today.

Daly

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