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Looking for information management solution
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Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 26, 2009 at 12:45 PM
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
Posted by Eduardo Mauro
Oct 26, 2009 at 01:03 PM
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.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Oct 26, 2009 at 01:07 PM
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.
Steve Z.
Posted by Dr Andus
Oct 28, 2009 at 11:01 AM
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
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Oct 28, 2009 at 03:33 PM
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.