Entering "organisation"

Devonthink has a data field called “organisation”, which is a useful attribute to have for reports etc so that we can specify where the report came from (not the author, but the endorsing organisation).

I cannot however figure out how to edit this data field in Devonthink! How is this done? I have looked at both “get info” and “show properties” for the file but it doesn’t seem to be in either. Thanks.

That is the Company field in Tools > Show Properties. It is not usable by just any file format. It can only be used with RTF(D) files.
Screen Shot 2018-01-10 at 11.06.47 AM.png

(Oops! Missed an “L” in “LLC” :mrgreen: )

Hi Bluefrog, many thanks for the swift reply.

This would be very useful info to have and it is quite limiting that we can only add it for RTF files. Can we expand Devonthink to be able to add this data to any file type?

No. The metadata is specific to the RTF specification. Why don’t you add this as a Tag instead? That’s the accepted place for arbitrary metadata on files in general (ie. not type-specific).

I could add it via tag - but then why not add all data fields by tag? I think there is merit in the most useful data having their own fields. Publication date would also be extremely useful to have added.

I agree… why not?

This is a highly subjective statement. What’s useful to one isn’t necessariy useful to another. Per your example, publication date is meaningless to me. I would like a category for bassist but that’s likely meaningless to you. There are many, many potential things you could add, but their importance (hence their inclusion as “data fields”) is relative to the User.
(Note that we have some things in discussion that may be related to this but don’t sit around waiting for it :mrgreen: )

Interesting example Bluefrog - though I would argue that for a document management app, publication date is key as it is a fundamental attribute of a document. Bassist, whilst perhaps relevant to a small number of documents, is much more niche. Every document will have a publication date - 0% of my 4000 documents have a bassist :smiley:

It’s document and information management. I would say less than 5% of the records in my databases have publication dates. :smiley: Remember, DEVONthink is flexible for many uses. It is certainly not just for academics.

That may be so - though I would imagine that the vast majority of Devonthink users utilise the software to manage documents - be it academic, legal, personal or any other form of document. I can’t think of many forms of “information” (as you put it) that do not take the general form of a document. Media (photos, music etc) tends to be managed using other software. May I ask what kind of thing the 95% of your Devonthink records are, which do not have publication dates?

That being said, I think that if Devonthink could perhaps devote a little more attention to the “academics” it would gain a number of customers that are currently drawn towards academic document management apps such as Mendeley or Papers. These are both great apps and have some good features that Devonthink lacks - though I remain with Devonthink as I find those apps a little too specialised and bloated with features I will not use. I have a range of records in my databases, both academic and personal, and so am looking for a solution that will tidily manage them all.

Improved support for custom metadata is definitely in the pipeline.

That is great to hear. I just hope that the pipes involved are fast-flowing and free of clogs :slight_smile:

I am not an academic (in the traditional sense of the word as you’d think of it), nor am I a corporate researcher or a lawyer, etc. My use of DEVONthink - personal and professional - does not require me to cite sources nor does it (generally) require temporal filtering. I require no bibliographic information. My databases are full of various things for support purposes but personally, I write every day in DTPO (in Markdown :mrgreen: ) so I have many Markdown files. They have no “publication dates”. I have PDFs galore. Screencaptures. Media files. etc., etc. ad infinitum.


We have a very large academic User base. We also know that companion apps aren’t necessarily a bad thing. The old saw goes, If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. DEVONthink is more like a ratchet set - a simple function with options to fit different needs. A multi-tool (nor a Swiss army knife - though I love them and have had many in my life) does no job extremely well. It does them passably, but individual dedicated tools do a much better job. We don’t want to be the multi-tool that does everything “okay”. To this end, we listen and consider suggestions and criticisms, but we also need to maintain focus on what DEVONthink is ideally suited for.

Here’s an example: You can certainly file your images in DEVONthink, but people imagine it will be like a DAM (digital asset management) application. It won’t be. Apps like Portfolio or even Adobe Bridge (which is now free but slowwww) are made for this and have things like metadata capturing / filtering / etc. So it’s not that you can’t put pictures in DEVONthink. It’s just that it’s going to be similar to keeping them in a Finder folder.

I hope that makes sense.
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I was also looking for a field to add a publication date and find it strange that there isn’t any.

So, I vote for the addition of a publication date field in the “Document Properties” table :slight_smile: