Comments on: Better Exams Using Devon

By: Tauseef Khan

Tauseef Khan — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 20:50:24 +0000

Great post. I have been following your posts for the past 1 month now and these have been intrumental in my tilt towards getting an Apple machine.
Its amazing how much this software can do! Currently I am doing a systematic review in field of childhood nutrition and am using a windows based computer. It is so hard to keep track of all the articles, reports, and reviews. I wasted a long time today just going through my documents to find one piece of information I read sometime back and could not remember where, I print, file and highlight most for easy review later but I could not find this piece today. And guess what – I had to open most of my pdf’s spread over a dozen of folders and search for that information, especially when most of my pdf’s are named like 1035224.pdf etc.
After this frustrating experience I was so happy with this ‘most productive’ use of my academic time I just said: “That is it, I am done with windows! Steve Jobs you just had another convert” and then I ordered a Macbook (1GB ram, 80 GB harddisk) from the Apple store through my university website. In the UK it comes with a whopping 15% discount. Now I just can’t wait to get all my documents transferred to devonthink and increase my productivity!
Now more frustration – it will take atleast 20 days to arrive – I guess Apple cannot keep up with the demand due to the back-to-school promotion.

By: dave

dave — Sun, 30 Jul 2006 03:37:27 +0000

Lew,
Glad it was helpful, look for more in the coming weeks, as I also will talk about using DevonAgent, and how I am using DevonThink to write my dissertation. This was just step one.

By: Lew Friedland

Lew Friedland — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 19:42:04 +0000

This is a great and useful post, one of the first I have seen from an academic using Devon. I am a relative newcomer to Devon (a professor) and have the problem of translating a relatively large mass of douments, etc. I would just encourage you to share your ideas about how to use Devon in this way.
Thanks very much.

By: dave

dave — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 15:28:07 +0000

Actually let me change this a bit more, if you write somethign as a .rtf and save it elsewhere, lets say you write in in a word processor program and save it in your Documents folder. Than you tell Devon that this document should be in the database. Changing the main document updates it in Devon.

But let’s say you make a document in MSWord, copy and select all the text, open Devon and create a new .rtf doc in Devon and cut and paste it. Changing the original MSWord will not change the .rtf copy.

You can always create a link in the devon document to the original though.

By: jenn

jenn — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 15:23:35 +0000

bummer.

By: dave

dave — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 12:56:45 +0000

Depends, if it is a link to the document elsewhere than no. For example if it is a link to a web page stored on your computer, but if the Devon document was just a copy and paste of something you wrote than yes.

By: jenn

jenn — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 12:41:53 +0000

Question: When I make alterations/revisions to a document, I then need to REsave it in DevonThink???