One of the most common ways we organize our data is with folders and subfolders (groups and subgroups in DEVONthink). Maybe you are someone that tracks your receipts on a monthly basis. Perhaps you are a teacher that organizes student data in a series of subfolders. Or you may be a real estate agent that creates a folder for each new property you’re working with and you like to have subfolder for pictures, documents, etc. If you ever find yourself reconstructing group hierarchies in DEVONthink, here’s a handy way to create a template that will do most of the work for you. (mehr)

Historian and power user Rachel Leow has recently published a thorough review of DEVONthink Pro Office in Perspectives on History. She explains how she uses our software for her research and where the obstacles are when trying to reach the Holy Grail, the paperless office. Rachel introduces us into this conundrum: … (mehr)

… with Neal Thompson and mentions also DEVONthink. Neil about the interview:

Steven Johnson (author of “The Ghost Map”) visited a Seattle Barnes & Noble to discuss his latest book, “Where Good Ideas Come From.” I spoke with him afterwards about the rituals and routines of his daily writing life. The key? A big cup of coffee and 500 words a day. — Seattle, October 2010 … (mehr)

In the Academic Technology blog Evan Cordulack describes how he uses DEVONthink Pro Office for his research:

Its basic features allow me to organize my research in a way that lets me see big chunks of it at the same time from a variety of different groupings and view options. Once the sources are in Devonthink Pro Office, it largely gets out of the way so that I can focus interpreting the sources. The application’s ability to group, tag, and search documents as well as convert documents to full text makes it useful to me and has made my writing process easier. (mehr)

Many people who are using David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology are also using a tickler file. It consists of 43 folders, one for each month of the year and 31 for the days of the month, in which you keep documents that become relevant at a certain time. DEVONthink Pro already comes with some basic smart templates for this. Forum user Sampsa went a lot further and created a whole series of scripts that create the necessary group structure and even manage it. Documents previously filed for today are automatically moved into the Inbox by a script attached to an iCal alarm. (mehr)

German power user  ”Denkenswert” writes in his blog about how to use DEVONthink more productively. In two articles he talks about how to use pre-fab and user-defined templates to work faster with DEVONthink. (mehr)

Mac blogger Macdrifter recently started a mini series of postings about how writers work and which tools they use. He started with blogger and multimedia designer Brett Terpstra. For his research Brett uses DEVONagent Pro and DEVONagent Express. (mehr)

In a recent article on TidBITS Tonya Engst talks about how she manages school papers digitally:

The ScanSnap is addictive, and I’ve hardly begun to learn how to use it. Here’s how cool it is: My son comes home from the first day of school with a fistful of forms and handouts. I open the scanner, stick them in, choose an option from the ScanSnap icon in the Dock, and push the big blue button on the scanner. Within moments (or minutes if I chose to run OCR) the entire pile is onscreen, even the double-sided forms and the pages that emerge from the backpack slightly crumpled. (mehr)

What method to use for capturing thoughts is a highly subjective subject: some write outlines, some just a simple text, and some prefer mind maps. DEVONthink supports text and very simple outlines (e.g. using rich text lists), but not (yet) mind maps. Some options are: … (mehr)

All our software is made for heavy-duty professional use. And so it’s no wonder that its used all over the world by researchers dealing with huge piles of data. One of the is Rachel Leow, blogger and historian. She started to use DEVONthink for her PhD thesis in humanities research and now she gives her blog readers an insight into her database. (mehr)