DEVONthink Pro Office
Product Review
Publisher: DEVONtechnologies
Price: $149.95
Pros: Make a paperless office a reality, with built-in OCR technology to scan and store documents as searchable PDFs; also stores Word documents, media objects, and more; allows you get to more work done thanks to bringing things together and indexing them; iPod Notes exporting and iPhone web integration
Cons: Website import crashed each time I attempted to use it; Edits made to stored documents in external programs must be saved to a new file and re-imported (DEVON says this behavior will be changed in the next release); interface seems “last generation” in style, inconsistent with current visual style preferred by Mac apps.
Product Rating
Excellent- Rated 4.5 By Author
by Ron Schoedel, AAUG Member
Information overload is a problem many of us try to cope with on a daily basis. Think about how many pieces of paper you handle during the course of a day or a week. Quite possibly this number is in the hundreds. Assimilating all of this information, and then keeping track of it, can be a real chore. Many of us do nothing more than stack things up until the stacks get too big, then file it away. This is hardly an effective system and does nothing to make all that data accessible in the future, without some real effort to track down the tidbit you are looking for.
DEVONthink Pro Office aims to be the organizer of all those data you want to keep but need some help organizing. Even the best organized person can sometimes find themselves wondering how to keep all sorts of data from various sources organized in a meaningful matter. We have bookmarks in Safari, email messages in Mail or Entourage, PDFs and Word documents in the Finder, which require opening external programs to read, and so forth.
Organization is not just for work; home users can benefit from being able to better keep track of their information, such as bills, statements, medical records, sports and school records, recipes, and so forth.
What if you could stir all your Word docs, PDFs, bookmarks, web clippings, images, chat logs, and many other forms of data into one organizational pot, so to speak? You may have recipes that are in Word documents, for example; maybe some favorite cooking websites in Safari with a bunch of bookmarked recipes; and a few PDFs, too–maybe scanned in from your cookbooks. In the world of printed data, we might just end up tossing all of these things into a box or a drawer. In our Macs, we often just end up tossing them all into our Documents folder, where they more often than not just lay around–often with meaningless document titles, hard for us to find in a hurry.
DEVONthink Pro Office invites us to grab all of these documents and plop them into its digital file cabinet, where we can organize (quickly!) a hierarchy and structure that will meet our needs, and modify it as we go along. (more…)
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