Maintaining a knowledge base

[stevenamills]

When I find an article or website with important information, I tend to produce a pdf and keep it on my key in a folder, cleverly called "pdfs". I take time to give the file as descriptive a name as possible, but as it has grown it has become more difficult to find what I need.

Recently, I've been using 2 programs to search the pdfs and it's been working quite well. I had used Evernote, but the new version doesn't seem to have a portable install and it wasn't great for this purpose anyway. These are portable and fairly quick. Obviously a program that keeps a dB and indexes the files would be faster, but also more complicated for this limited purpose.

The 2 programs are Filehound (3.08) and PDFExchange (portable).

The reason I'm using 2 is I haven't decided which is best. Actually, I was unaware PDFExchange had a search feature until I read it on Gizmo's site. You can point either program to the folder containing the files, list the search term and either will list all documents with the term.

I hope others might find this useful.

 

[Larry Sabo]

FileSeeker is excellent -- very fast, portable, freeware and searches numerous file types. Just tried searching for words within PDF files and it didn't work, unfortunately, although the search for words within TXT and DOC files works fine. Still very handy for finding programs and URLs on a flash drive that's as disorganized as mine.

=====
File Seeker description
A program that searches for files inside your computer with excellent search speed

File Seeker is a useful file utility that searches (with an ultra fast search algorithm) for files inside your computer with excellent search speed. It finds hidden and system files as well.

Additionally File Seeker searches within all known types of Compressed Files (rar,zip,cab...). You can also search for words or phrases inside files of your choise for reducing searching time and for better results. Includes special Filters that make the search more better and accurate.

Here are some key features of "File Seeker":

· File searching with excellent speed rate using an extremely fast algorithm
· Enhanced "search within documents" ability
· Capability of searching within 23 types of compressed files (included all known rar, zip, cab, jar?)
· Special Filters for making the search faster and more accurate
· Intuitive user interface.

 

[PcTek9]

Hey did you see the program called 'everything' that BryceW posted about? It's in the articles or the blog I believe.
I've got some software program that is just uhmm really unusual. It scans anything through the scanner, then can recall any of the documents by the writing on them.

How do i mean that... It's like a database, that I can move documents to, scan documents in, whatever, and then I can search and it very quickly will pull up say an image of last years electric bill or some new virus removal instructions i found, etc. whatever I am looking for.

I beleive it is called Xerox Pagis. Anyway, I got it because I used to work for a billion dollar insurance giant, on the technical support team and we had a guy that all he did was scan in things customers signed, all correspondence. They had bought a giant desk sized scanner, he would feed letters into it one after another all day long, and it would stick them in the mainframe (sucked them right through like a vaccuum cleaner). So that way customer service reps could pull up the very insurance application the customers sent in, along with any correspondence and fax it back to the customer if they tried to say they didn't sign up, or someone forged their signature or whatever. Pretty neat stuff.

Back then there was about 300 customer service reps, at their own little desks, and this one guy just feeding that scanner. Of course it was a super industrial scanner I know this, but I was so impressed with it at the time because it was so incredibly fast. When we implemented the technology to fax stuff right to the customer (showing their original applications and correspondence) they were impressed as well.

 

[ProTech-MN]

Not sure how you're creating the PDF's, but if you're using Acrobat Std or Pro, then use it to simply create an index of your PDF's - poof! instant, fully searchable catalog of all your PDF files.

-Randy