Recomment a program to organize documents

Hello,

I have a lot of documents, ebooks and manuals most in PDF format.
Anyone can recommend a program to organize it all in a comfortable way, tags and folders.

Thanx.

 

Check out Zulupad from http://www.gersic.com/zulupad/

I've been using it for ages, now.

ONE WORD OF WARNING.
Make sure you keep more than 1 backup of your current file. It sometimes loses its place and your current file. :cry I backup my current file to 2 other separate places every time before I exit.

Thumbnail of some of my topics, as an example.
Doubleclick on the black thumbnail for an increased size image.

Bazza

PS: Do a google search on Zulupad for lots of links.

Baz

 

This is a really interesting question.

I think the answer to it may depend in part on how many documents you have to organize for later retrieval. The big problem in document management is always converting over to a new system (voice of bitter experience here).

There are two primary ways that most people go about retrieving information from documents: the "Yahoo" way and the "Google" way (there are fancier ways but probably overkill for your purposes).

What do I mean by this? Well, you can organize information to be retrieved by means of an index or outline (most people's folder structures fall into this category--this is the "Yahoo" way), or you can make your whole mass of information be free-text-searchable (this is the theory behind apps such as Google desktop).

Zulupad sounds like it would be fantastic for new data entered into it, and Word data uploaded into it, but I didn't see, at least in a superficial review of the program, how to load .pdf documents into it to make them searchable.

The simplest way, I think, would be this. Put all your documents that you want to organize in one place, say one of the new 1 TB hard drives if you really have a lot.* Make them all searchable .pdfs (the full Adobe has had this capability since 5.0: http://www.adobe.com/uk/epaper/tips/acr5search/index.html ). If you have world enough and time, you can do document summaries for everything. Then run an index. In order to maintain your document library, you'll have to reindex periodically, depending on how often you add new documents to your system. You have your own little Google-able universe of documents on that hard drive.

This isn't "elegant," because you won't have pretty folders in a hierarchical system, but you will be able to obtain information from your documents quickly enough, I would think, and maintain the system without much trouble after the initial conversion.

HTH

FJM

*I'm still amazed at how much fits on a 1 GB jump drive.

 

This may not be what you're looking for, but if you're looking for something that will search your document(s), then I suggest trying Copernic.

http://www.copernic.com/

You'll want the Home version and you'll probably want to customize it to just search certain folders. But Copernic is basically a search program. I use it everyday. :cool

 

Check out free and open source SCAN (Smart Content Aggregation and Navigation).

 

@FighterJetMom@

I load references to documents, not to pdf's of the actual documents themselves. I would guess that you cannot search, in Zulupad, for text in pdf's. I could be wrong, but it would be able to point you to the relevant pdf and you could use something like Foxit reader to search / display the original pdf document. Two steps involved. Bazza

 

I can see how that might meet the needs of the OP--kind of an index without hierarchy?

 

First, thank you all for you recommendations.

One thing I find hard to believe, there are millions of programs that manage to do everything for you (including managing you) and no one wrote somthing for the specific purpose of managing docs yet.

Huh, anyways I'l check out what youve sudgested.
Thanx again!

 

Oh, there are plenty of programs for document *management*, but they don't do the initial strategizing for you about how you want them organized. Take a look at this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_management_system and the list of systems there.

For personal use some freebies (I haven't used any of them and am not recommending them) are: http://www.oasys-software.com/products/document_management/columbus/

http://www.docuxplorer.com/

If you want to spend some dough there's http://worlddox.com/ but it sounds like overkill for your purposes.

FJM