Almost a convert

DEVONthink Feedback
1

I’ve been evaluating DevonThink and have - in general - been enormously impressed. I work with dozens of clients and teams and the ability to see more documents “like” one I’m viewing in itself would have been enough to get me to buy.

But - one glaring problem. Powerpoint. Whether we like it or not consultants like me live in a world of Word, Excel and Powerpoint. The inability to index PowerPoint documents blows the usability of the tool out of the water for me. I don’t want to have to name them carefully, I don’t want to have to deal with them at all - that’s why I want an indexer.

Perhaps you could suck the data in from Spotlight? Don’t know the technical issues - but without this it’s only a 75% solution - which is in fact worse than no solution at all.

Any plans for the future?

T

2

Can’t promise anything yet but hopefully V2 will be at least able to index much more file formats.

3

In my experience, Spotlight will not find slide or note text in PP files without major tweaking of the Spotlight preferences. See this article: http://www.macworld.com/2005/04/features/tigerspotlight/index.php

I have better luck with EasyFind: enter .ppt in the search box, check Only Files, All Words, and Case Insensitive. That gathers up all the PP files, and then clicking on the Modified or Where columns takes me to the slide talk I want. EasyFind is freeware from the folks at DT.

4

I have never ‘tweaked’ spotlight in any way and use it regularly, and (so far as I can tell) accurately, to find text on PP slides. I’ve never had occassion to search for note text so I don’t know about that.

5

Spotlight does index and find both slide text as well as presenter notes for Powerpoint. Works fine - but of course not nearly as useful as having it directly integrated into DT.

6

ttague: DT Pro cannot currently index Powerpoint (or KeyNote) presentations.

But I’ve captured the text and images of such presentations that are important to me, by using an easy workaround. So I’ve captured lots of presentations into my database from conferences or Web sites.

Any document capable of being printed from its native operation can be captured into the database as PDF, with fully searchable and analyzable text.

With the document open, press Command-P. When the Print panel opens, click on the PDF button and select “Save to Devonthink Pro.scpt”. The resulting searchable PDF will be saved in the database Files folder.

7

What I was going to suggest, Bill. This works very well – for nearly ALL applications that aren’t imported “properly.” That is, PowerPoint, Keynote, Pages, etc. Print to PDF and archive in DT.