Grazing on information

Imagine holding a virtual highlighter in your hand as you read web pages, documents, or PDF files. You highlight sections of text you want to save or indicate images to preserve, and with a familiar keystroke, send them to Topicgrazer.

It works with web sites, text, Word documents, PDF files, spreadsheets and more – anything, in fact, that can be saved to the clipboard. Each snippet is headed with its source if it came from a web site or Word, for example.

By the time you have finished, all the portions you select are extracted and gathered in one document that you can open with Wordpad, MS Word or OpenOffice Writer.

That is Topicgrazer … a low-cost, high-value item

And it’s now on sale here at the Topicscape site.

Roy

Being a really visual guy, I like to have everything in front of my face and visible.  So my PC’s Desktop is pretty crowded.

I used to group related items so that despite the large number of icons, I knew roughly where to look for things, but it wasn’t ideal.  Then I found Fences and order reigned:

Fences is free software that allows you to organize your icons visually in areas, much like Windows 3, but with less fuss over frames and titles.

And if you want to stop multi-tasking and focus, focus, focus – you can double-click the desktop and all the clutter disappears …

until you double-click again.

Recommended.  There’s a Pro version as well, but the free one is just fine for me.

Roy

Here’s a useful thing I found.  I have some very old inventory lists that I needed to open.

They were prepared in Lotus 1-2-3 (remember that?) and had file extensions .WKS and .WK1.  Excel in Office 2007 did not recognize them and Windows had no application associated with them.

I Googled for a free conversion utility and didn’t see anything useful near the top of the list.  So I moved them to a different PC that had Open Office installed on it, and it recognized both extensions.

Open OO, choose ‘Open a document’, navigate to the WKS file, and save as Excel.

Job done.

Welcome to OpenOffice.org indeed!

As Open Office is free, it’s worth tucking that little nugget away in the back of your mind.  Let’s hope Oracle doesn’t bin OO now they’ve bought Sun – better download a copy now, just in case.

Roy

PS Note to self – never assume you won’t want those old files again!

I firmly believe that zooming interfaces are the way of the future for information organizers.  With the volumes of information we have to handle, we need to be able to take in the big picture and zoom in rapidly on any area for the detail.   I just found this at the OutlinerSoftware forum:  TreeSheets 

TreeSheets is a text-based information organizer with a zooming interface a little like Topicscape (but only the zooming part!)     Organize a grid like this extract:

Notice the grid of cells, and the nested sub-grids.  It has titles and then some references I wanted to go back to when I had time.  The gray lines are very tiny text.  I grouped them under headings, saved each URL list in the cell (a grid inside a grid) and shrunk the grid using the mouse wheel while holding down Ctrl.

Then to see them, you just click the cell you want to examine:

and roll the mouse wheel forward:

The surrounding grid disappears, and the selected cell zooms up so you see just its text and its sub-grid contents, enlarged.  This image is reduced to fit the blog width – the actual result is clearer and larger.  Roll the wheel back and you see the whole sheet again.

This means you can have a lot on the screen at once, but avoid detail until you want it.  It’s a neat little application.

Roy

OK, so I’m a cheapskate.  I still use CorelDraw 7 even though they’re up to X3 (or is that down to X3?) now.

 I found that when I opened a directory with a .CPT file in it, Windows Explorer would close spontaneously.  Fellow workers said it’s something to do with the automatic icon-making function in PhotoPaint and they were right.

 To fix it, go to CORELDraw7 | Graphics Utilities | Uninstall Thumbnail display.

 Job done.

If you use SlickRun and you can see it running in Task Manager but not on your screen, check if it’s running on a display your computer thinks you have, but isn’t really there.

Right-click desktop | Settings | Advanced | click on your graphics adapter’s tab and see if the display is set to dual view.  Worked for me on an nVidia display.