What software would you recommend for organizing thousand of quotes?
The quotes would have to be able to be sorted by date, author and multiple types/categories.
Would you recommend a straightforward relational database or another tool?

Thanks

Depends on how long the quotes are and what kind of analysis you need to do with the attributes -- but you might not need a database. Excel or Numbers or Open Office should be able to handle a fairly robust single-table sort of approach.

ConnectedText would be great for this.

upon further thought, PiggyDB would also be a good choice for this, and is free/open source.

I agree that Connected Text would be fine for this job. But there are so many possible factors that might influence what the best application would be, so I'll suggest that you also look into Zoot and/or UltraRecall and/or MyInfo.

Steve Z.

Some vital missing information before I could make a recommendation:

* Is the quote database to be shared with others?

* If so, do they need editing capability?

* Do you need to sort by multiple columns?

* Do you need to retrieve and sort only information that matches some criteria?

And the biggie, what use of the information is to be made after it is sorted? E.g., use as a bibliography in a word processor; display as web page; etc.

Best regards,

Paul

Filemaker Pro

If you want to go the relational route, but use a Mac rather than a PC, try Ninox, a very nice - and much cheaper - relational database project for Mac, iPad and iPhone "made in Germany". We've been experimenting and are seriously considering replacing FileMaker Pro with this neat, convenient solution, not least because it's vastly more cost-efficient - FileMaker is impressive, but the price per user is beginning to look positively ogre-ish, especially for upgraders.

With Ninox, it's also very easy to build rapid-deployment apps. You can produce highly sophisticated or very simple layouts, precisely as you like. Templates are provided for those who like them.

The Ninox server either runs in the Cloud or on your own local machine (and is available in Windows and Mac versions, which makes it very attractive).

The Ninox team are very responsive, in my experience. They're not desperately good at marketing themselves, so could do with some support!

More details at https://ninoxdb.de/ninox/en/

I haven't used this but it's an intriguing tool fit for purpose:

https://airtable.com/

Thanks much for the input.
I'm looking for a PC application. The quotes would be sorted by multiple criteria.
Eventually, a book or pdf composite is contemplated; no web aspirations at this
point. No sharing or editing by others.

I haven't used Zoot since the conversion to rich text. It might be just right,
except I don't know if it produces "reports."

Another possibility to consider is CintaNotes:

http://cintanotes.com/

You'd have to devise a tagging scheme to organize by topic/category and author, but that shouldn't be too difficult.

Steve Z.

Brad91 wrote:

What software would you recommend for organizing thousand of quotes?

The quotes would have to be able to be sorted by date, author and multiple types/categories.
Would you recommend a straightforward relational database or another tool?

InfoQube would handle that task with ease.
- You have custom fields, search, sorting and filtering.
- You can now categorize with multi-select pop-up list if need be
- Pivot tables to summarize.
- Live-links to Excel to report and share
- Rich text directly in the grid and in a separate rich text pane
- Zotero import possible is needed
- Timeline for a date-dependent view of the quotes


Pierre Paul Landry
IQ Designer
http://www.infoqube.biz/

Maybe GS-Base could be an option for you.

http://www.citadel5.com/gs-base.htm

It's table-based, provides arbitrary categories, sorting, printed reports, build in functions, is portable, light-weight and very fast.
Runs on Windows only.

best regards

Achim

Hi there,
I suggest you have a look at Daniel Lüdeckes Zettelkasten (http://zettelkasten.danielluedecke.de/ It's made for collecting academic quotations, excerpts and literature citations, modelled after Luhmanns Zettelkasten method. It is somewhat idiosyncratic in it's UI, but quite powerful in it's filtering (source/author, keywords, ...) and output options (htms, rtf, latex, odt etc).

I looked for quite the same thing for a long time and tried dozens of programs. Relational DB systems are normally too clumsy, you have to worry about tables, indexes, queries etc. ConnectedText felt somewhat clumsy in it's own way, especially for huge numbers of small snippets. CintaNotes was promising, but I would have to pay to get rich text. DataCrow is not a bad program for such cases, but it doesn't have rich text. So while Zettelkasten may be somewhat unconventional, it comes very close to what you are looking for.

Judith

There's lots of proggies you could use to store quotes, and some I have used are:
* Lotus Agenda - FREE Text only, no RTF (on Win10-64 that would have to be run under DOSBOX from http://www.dosbox.com
Agenda is a DOS program, available via download links per Wikipedia entry as public domain.).
Text can be stored as small text files outside the database, and thus searchable by WDS (Windows Desktop Search).

* CHS (Clipboard Help & Spell): FREE Text (no RTF) and images (from DonationCoder.com).
An excellent clipboard and very nifty tool whose database is great for storing any text content and (separately) images - though text can be attached to images - and all is rapidly searchable with user-configurable "virtual" folders (auto-generated and stored SQL search terms).
Arguably one of the best - if not THE best - clipboard tool available, though it lacks the RTF+images and HTML capability of NoteFrog.

* Notefrog: USD10 or so, text, RTF+images and HTML From http://notefrog.com/
Another excellent and very useful clipboard tool, it even has a ready-made database of quotes for users. In Beta development, upgrades have stopped until they sort out how to resource future development.

* Info Select: Superb PIM: USD-Lots. I use IS8 (version 8), but there are later versions IS9, IS10. IS11 Beta has just been launched (I am trialling it now).
Text can/could be stored as small text files outside the database, and thus searchable by WDS (Windows Desktop Search)..

* MS Excel 2016 spreadsheet-database: Could be a perfect tool for this sort of thing.
Flexible options. Having a database using a common and widely-used database format could make it easy to share or to migrate to another database tool. It's an LCD (.CSV format would be a Lowest Common Denominator).
The content of Excel spreadsheets can be indexed/searched by WDS (Windows Desktop Search).

* InfoQube: Could be a perfect tool for this sort of thing.
Not sure if Flexible options. Having a database using an uncommon/proprietary database format could make it difficult to share or to migrate to another database tool.

* GS-base: Could be a perfect tool for this sort of thing.
Not sure if Flexible options. Having a database using an uncommon/proprietary database format could make it difficult to share or to migrate to another database tool.

* OneNote: As a relatively advanced user of OneNote, I wouldn't recommend it for this kind of task per se, though I would suggest that you could well keep the quotes database in (say) Excel and store it as an object contained in a OneNote Notebook. This would give you the benefit of having the database optionally as:
(a) just existing in a Notebook on the client, or
(b) existing in a Notebook in the Cloud AND on the client, and
(c) shareable, if in a Notebook in the Cloud.
- in addition to which, you would have the database in a tool (Excel) which is widely used and has an LCD format (as described above).
However, objects like Excel spreadsheets do not currently have their context indexed/searchable by either OneNote search or WDS, so that could be a potential drawback.
=================================
Just some thoughts. Hope they are of use/help.

Slartibartfarst wrote:

* InfoQube: Could be a perfect tool for this sort of thing. Not sure if Flexible options. Having a database using an uncommon/proprietary database format could make it difficult to share or to migrate to another database tool.

For the record, IQ uses JET which is the same database engine as MS Access, which you can also use.
In addition, Excel can read information stored in IQ. Migration to another database tool, should the need be, is easy !

Pierre Paul Landry

@Pierre Paul Landry: Thanks for ^^ that comment.
I must apologise that I have been unable to spend sufficient time with IQ (on my current trial of it) to be able to give a more informed comment about it.