I'd like to ask for some advice on software that could help me with the following problem. On my Windows XP PC I have a folder with 110 sub-folders, each entitled with the date (e.g. 2008_01_16) when the material that it contains was collected. This material is mostly MS Word or Excel documents, PDF files, occasionally sound or image files). I would like to get a software that would enable me to categorise and annotate the contents of each folder. The data is about various organisations, some of which are related, and this categorisation and annotation would be part of the analysis of my data (it's for my PhD). Ideally this software would enable me to do this quickly (drag and drop data, add categories and annotations), and would also include a hyperlink back to the original folder and/or files, so I can drill down into the data if necessary.

Any suggestions?

doctorandus

You can accomplish what you describe using ConnectedText. You can drag topic/folders into topics, add categories/annotations to those topics. For instance, you can create a topic about subject X and drag and drop all files related to it into the topic. Notice that the same file/folder can add to more than one topic, if necessary. Using the file manager you can locate all topics that contain a file/folder.

I believe you'll find that Zoot does this very well. You can choose to import the file (or as much of the text as Zoot can read), and Zoot retains the link tot he original file. Zoot 6, which is now in beta testing, should be able to better handle more file types, but I wouldn't start using Z6 now, because the developer frequently updates the beta (I think we're up to beta version 80-something now) and often these require complete resets -- i.e. your data is no longer good. But Zoot 5 should handle this need well for you.

www.zootsoftware.com

Steve Z.

Many thanks for the suggestions so far. In the end I checked out ConnectedText, Zoot, Ultra Recall, MyInfo, and myBase. So far I'm leaning towards Ultra Recall as it seemed to have the least steep learning curve and made it the easiest to import the folders. All I had to do was drag and drop the folder with all the sub-folders into UR, and it kept the original folder hierarchy and recognised all the files within. It seems that from now on I can annotate each folder and file and add keywords.

This is almost everything I needed, except the sorting of categories. At the moment the keywords feature seems to be the only way to sort the items according to the categories that I give. It would be nice if the categories where actually displayed on the screen and I could just click on them to sort them in alphabetic order, for instance. Granted, I haven't had much time to fully explore UR yet, so there might be ways for me to allocate similar items to their separate folders, which would solve my problem.

doctorandus

Dr Andus wrote:

I'd like to ask for some advice on software that could help me with the following
problem. On my Windows XP PC I have a folder with 110 sub-folders, each entitled with
the date (e.g. 2008_01_16) when the material that it contains was collected. This
material is mostly MS Word or Excel documents, PDF files, occasionally sound or image
files). I would like to get a software that would enable me to categorise and annotate
the contents of each folder. The data is about various organisations, some of which
are related, and this categorisation and annotation would be part of the analysis of
my data (it's for my PhD). Ideally this software would enable me to do this quickly
(drag and drop data, add categories and annotations), and would also include a
hyperlink back to the original folder and/or files, so I can drill down into the data if
necessary.

Any suggestions?

doctorandus

I think you made the right choice with UltraRecall for what you want. As a bonus, if the files you imported are readable by UR (DOC, XLS, PPT, PDF etc) they will have now been indexed, allowing you to directly search their contents from within the program without opening them.

Regarding categorisation: UR supports cloning (I think it referes to clones as 'symbolic links'). You can copy an information item from the tree as many times as you like, and organise it in other folders to get different views of your data, while always referring to the same actual file. So you can maintain the folder structure that reflects your disk organisation, while also organising the items in categorised folders, or alphabetically or whatever.

UR creates clones of items when you simply copy/paste them; you will know that they are clones because they will have the shortcut arrow on their icons. If you want independent copies, right click instead of pasting and choose Paste Special > Copy.

Dr Andus wrote:

This is almost
everything I needed, except the sorting of categories. At the moment the keywords
feature seems to be the only way to sort the items according to the categories that I
give. It would be nice if the categories where actually displayed on the screen and I
could just click on them to sort them in alphabetic order, for instance. Granted, I
haven't had much time to fully explore UR yet, so there might be ways for me to allocate
similar items to their separate folders, which would solve my problem.

Alex,

Isn't UR quite slow in importing some file types? I don't have the latest version, but it seemed to me to be much slower in importing Web pages than, say, MyBase. Of course it does have other capabilities that may well outweigh the slowness.

-c

Dr Andus wrote:

This is almost
everything I needed, except the sorting of categories. At the moment the keywords
feature seems to be the only way to sort the items according to the categories that I
give. It would be nice if the categories where actually displayed on the screen and I
could just click on them to sort them in alphabetic order, for instance.

I also think you made a good choice. UltraRecall is mature, stable, flexible and designed to do what you describe. (Zoot would be my 2nd choice but I haven't used the latest version.) A quick suggestion would be to investigate the "saved searches" feature. The "saved search" for a given category (as a user keyword or attribute) will display the result in a child pane in which you "just can click on them to sort". Alexander's suggestion of creating a folder-as-category with links to the files would also work if I understand your problem properly.

You can get the help you need in the UR forum....see you there.

Over several year of daily use, I have never encountered an unreasonable speed problem with importing web pages.

Cassius wrote:

Isn't UR quite slow in importing some file types? I don't have the latest
version, but it seemed to me to be much slower in importing Web pages than, say, MyBase.
Of course it does have other capabilities that may well outweigh the slowness.

Indeed, UltraRecall is no match for a specialised program like Surfulater when importing web pages; Surfulater gets its content directly from Internet Explorer, whereas UR re-downloads the page, so the speed difference is noticeable. I haven't worked with Mybase since a couple of versions back, so I have no idea how that fares comparatively.

However, UR is much more flexible for a much broader range of uses and I think that it's ideal for what Dr Andus was looking for: a program to automatically hoover files from a multitude of directories, allowing their organisation and anotation. I used it as a complementary tool to import and index my PDF journal articles and I found it lightning fast.

Many thanks once more for all the suggestions. I spent a bit more time exploring Ultra Recall and it fits my needs very well. Very nice piece of software. I did notice that it is slower with importing websites, however I use Surfulater for that anyway, so it's not a concern at all.

doctorandus

>Surfulater gets its content directly from
Internet Explorer, whereas UR re-downloads the page, so the speed difference is
noticeable. I haven't worked with Mybase since a couple of versions back, so I have no
idea how that fares comparatively.

UR has improved in this regard...
UR has an import option if checked, when importing documents from the web, Ultra Recall will always use the most recent version of any files found in Internet Explorer's temporary file cache. You can check this option if IE is your default browser to speed up imports. If unchecked, Ultra Recall will query the server for each file's timestamp (and retrieve the file if the server reports it has a newer copy) in order to ensure that the most recent version of the file is processed.