If you want to add additional information to a document in DEVONthink, that’s what the Comment field is made for. You can find it in the info panel that opens with Tools > Show Info or by pressing Command-Shift-I (we didn’t choose Command-I like in the Finder as this would collide with ‘make selected text italic’). Best of all: Comments are searchable.
Naming the documents that you put into your DEVONthink database can be a science or even an art in itself. Some prefer to use some systematics, other precede the documents with the current date (something I used to do but have long abandoned) , and even others simply try to describe the contents of the file. For most documents, however, a good name is already there: the headline of the captured article. To quickly rename the document, select the headline or whatever text passage you would like to use, right-click or Control-click, and choose Set Title As from the contextual menu. (more)
If you like using roman numerals for naming items, you may not be satisfied with Mac OS X’s ability to sort tem correctly. Our power user ‘kalisphoenix’ has posted a nice workaround in our online forum that uses Unicode characters, each one representing one roman numeral. You can easily copy the numerals from the posting and paste it wherever you need them.
Finally, we have updated all editions of DEVONthink as well as DEVONagent and DEVONnote for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. And, we have added a few more improvements and new features. Read the news or download the updates. These updates are strongly recommended for all users already working with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. Attention users of Mac OS X 10.3.9: All new releases require at least Mac OS X 10.4 or later.
I just wanted to let you know that we updated DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office to version 1.3.3. See our news page for more information on the update.
Just a quick note that we have updated DEVONthink Personal and DEVONnote to version 1.9.10.
The second season update this summer is DEVONthink Pro (Office). It adds minor improvements to almost all areas of DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office. DEVONthink Professional Office 1.3.2 supports MailTags 2.0 notes, allows to set the resolution and the compression of PDFs, and connects to ExactCode’s ExactScan software. Both editions allow you to set the background color of rich text documents, support grouping of found documents directly from within Classify and See Also drawers, and read Finder and Spotlight comments when sync’ing an indexed folder. The Dashboard widgets look way more attractive now, too.
If you need to get table-like data into DEVONthink Pro or out of it, nothing easier than that. From, e.g., Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice export your data as tab-separated or comma-separated values (.tsv, .csv). Import this into DEVONthink Pro and it will automagically appear as a sheet. To get a sheet out of DEVONthink, select it (not the individual records) and choose File > Export > As Files and Folders. It will get exported as tab-separated values that can be read by all spreadsheet applications on any platform.
If you receive a file that you cannot open because you don’t have the right piece of software at hand, or if you want to convert a file in a proprietary format for importing into DEVONthink, have a look at Zamzar, a free Web-based file conversion service that converts diverse document, image, audio, and video formats.
One of our users (thank you, Martin!) posted a few days ago that he notices that on the Author’s Note page (p. 414) in Michael Chabon’s new best seller novel, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” Chabon writes: “This novel was written on Macintosh computers using Devonthink Pro and Nisus Writer Express.” Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001 for his novel “Kavalier & Clay.” As we’ve not sponsored Mr. Chabon for putting us in there, we’re more than honored for the mentioning. If you are interested, here's a link to his novel at Amazon (no affiliate link, just for quick reference.)