How Zoot is helping me with a big project

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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 31, 2008 at 02:58 PM

I have been tasked with a project for my office, for which I have leaned heavily on Zoot. I think it exemplifies how a good PIM can make life easier—and highlights some of Zoot’s unique strengths.

We are putting together a nationwide survey of people in our field. We want to have subjects take the survey on line, which means we need to collect a bunch of e-mail addresses… which we do not currently have. So I have been tasked to start this project by contacting many professional organizations around the United States to ask them to share their membership lists. Many of these organizations are chapters of a nationwide organization and I could get their contact information from this umbrella agency’s web site. But they were not in one long list, but accessible in individual pop up windows. So I first opened Notetab and set it to capture any copied text. Then I opened each pop up window, and copied the text. In this way I was able to quickly gather up all the contact information in one text file. In this text file I then added a unique delimiter between each entry. After saving the text file, I was able to import it into Zoot, and create an individual entry for each of the separate chapters.

Because the clipped text already had “phone:” as a prefix to each phone number, I was able to just copy and drag “phone:” from one of the entries to the column bar in Zoot’s data grid to create a column that showed the phone number for each contact. Because I needed to track the status of each of these agencies, I created a single-pick folder column in the grid with choices for “phoned - spoke with”; “phoned - left message”; “no phone - e-mailed”; etc…

So, within about 10 minutes I had my database all set up and was ready to contact each agency, and could track the status of my requests.

But that is not the end of it. Some of the agencies have given permission to use their membership lists, but can only direct me to the membership directory on their web sites. To collect the membership contact information, I used another Zoot database, first clipping the information into Notetab—where I could clean it up a little (making sure that each e-mail address had the same prefix delimiter (“E-mail:”), and adding the unique delimiter between contacts). Then I imported those into Zoot, dragged the “E-mail:” delimiter to the grid, and was quickly able to create a database of contacts to export in CSV format to Excel.

I can’t imagine how much longer and more involved this project would be if I didn’t have Zoot working for me.

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 2, 2009 at 12:03 PM

Brilliant!

Many thanks for this; an excellent tour-de-force demonstration for Zoot.

And All the Best for the Whole of 2009 :-)

Alexander

P.S. I had no idea that Notetab could be set to automatically capture the clipboard input! I’ve always used Brainstorm for this. I think that this should be a standard feature for any info manager.

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