Getting to know DT3

DEVONthink
1

I’ve been an enthusiastic user of DevonThink Pro Office since 2008. It’s been an essential part of my workflow ever since, helping me write several books, capture the research for my PhD and so on. Really a wonderful piece of software that I’ve considered essential to my workflow and digital life for years.

I made the upgrade to DevonThink 3 just yesterday and I’ll admit to feeling quite at sea. Many of my old workflows, shortcuts to get to certain menu items, or views and behaviours — all gone / disrupted or hidden.

I did a bit of browsing through the forum here expecting to find many others like me, but it seems a lot of this was handled a few months back among beta users.

While I feel very much at sea / lost in the application’s interface at the moment, from previous experience I know I have the capacity to get used to a new interface. It’s disruptive and unwanted, but what to do? I miss the three-pane view, but it seems it’s not coming back, so I have to adapt myself.

My question is: what resources are available for users making this transition?

I was thinking of reading through the manual cover to cover, and then starting with some kind of a database to see what workflows might suit me best. But I wondered if there are videos or walkthroughs for people like me. (There must be others who would benefit from a “if you did it this way in v2, you should do it this way in v3”).

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A very good suggestion. My other favourite software, Scrivener, created a very useful and comprehensive guide to upgrading when they released their last major version a couple of years ago. The standard response here on the forums is that DT is such a flexible tool, it’s not feasible to create boilerplate guides. Personally I think that it would be nice if the developers/support could offer more concrete examples (that are not buried here on the forums) of how to use new features, or how to replace fairly basic tools/commands and workflows that have been deprecated. 3 pane view is obviously one, but no doubt there are others.

A good approach, @BLUEFROG has improved the manual enormously, IMHO.

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