Re: AskSam: No picklist?

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 3899

Posted by graham.smith
2005-08-25 08:51:19

Its some time since I used Asksam ( I upgraded to 5.1 professional, but never got around to installing it)but yes you can set up pick lists for fields - as far as I remember. Don’t ask me how, and I see the online help makes no mention of it, but persevere it should be there, as I rmember there were global pick lists and field pick lists.

Asksam is a very different tool to Zoot. Once upon a time, I used AskSam for everything, I had a database using fields for bibliographic records, I imported Word, PDFs and Outlook into AS to make them searchable, and I had several other databases set up for random data. It was low on resources and was fairly versatile.

However, I started to use Zoot, and Zoot was far better at dealing with random data than AskSam. I got fed up importing files into AS. just so they could be searched, and replaced that functionality with DTSearch, and then found out about file linking with Zoot. I bought a proper bibliogaphic database, because my Asksam database still didn’t create bibliographies inside a Word processor.

For a spell I stuck with AS for records that needed to be formatted, it worked far faster than Zoot at searching imported Outlook emails, and if you needed a more formal database with nicley formatted reports then AskSam was streets ahead of Zoot. But eventually, my use just drifted away.

I do occasionally think about re-installing it just for the Outlook capability, but that seems a bit of an overkill, and for formatted records, I would certainly be looking at something like UltraRecall now.

AskSam was revolutionary in its day, I think I originally bought version 2, but apart from some special purposes, I am struggling to think of any every day use that isn’t done better by other things.

I would love to be shown wrong however, as I have a great fondness for the program, and every so often I come across the CD and think about re-installing it.

Graham

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