I attend a lot of meetings. The meeting may discuss a variety of different documents in different formats (PDF, Excel, MS Word and more). I want to make notes against these individual documents and then merge them all into a single ‘meeting notes’ document (preferably with links back to the source documents).
I have tried using annotations - in each I can link back to parts of a source document, but I can’t find an easy way to merge all the individual annotations into a master document. I can go to the annotations group, but finding the individual annotations amongst the many of documents there to do Data->Merge is often time consuming. Once the single document is created I would want to delete the individual annotation documents. Turning the annotation setting to keep the annotations in the group of the meetings documents clutters it up with all the annotations (can the annotations be put in a sub group?)
I have experimented with Finder Comments field, but it is limited in what you can do there (can’t put links back into the document as far as I can tell). There is a script ‘Assemble’ which merges all the finder comments in a new text document which, with a bit of modification, I think would meet my purposes.
What do you advise? I find the various annotation panes and use of comments confusing. Thanks
I concur with @BLUEFROG and use this feature often. I have a bunch of docs in a group, say, Discovery, and annotate the docs there, then highlight them all and Summaeize, giving me an RTF with all the links, highlights, and notes. It’s handy. Though it would be with all PDFs. I’m not quite sure how or if it would work with Word or Excel docs, as AFAIK those can’t be “annotated” in the same sense. I guess if you just annotate those in the annotation pane it would work.
Ah thank you - I thought it only summarised the document annotations (like PDF markup) into the Reminders and Annotations pane. I didn’t realise it also summarised multiple Annotations pane annotations into one document - I will try it.
Just tried it and it doesn’t work. It only picks up annotations in the document annotation pane. None of the annotations made in the Reminders and annotations pane are included.
I did a quick test, and it works fine with markdown and RTF as well.
I was already playing around with scripting some annotation file stuff, so it was pretty quick to create this:
-- Merge annotation files of selected records to current group
-- Then trash individual annotations
tell application id "DNtp"
set theRecords to selected records whose annotation ≠ missing value
if (count of theRecords) > 1 then
set destination to current group
set annotationList to {}
repeat with theRecord in theRecords
copy (annotation of theRecord) to the end of annotationList
end repeat
merge records annotationList in destination
-- Move to trash
repeat with theAnnotation in annotationList
move record theAnnotation to (trash group of database of theAnnotation)
end repeat
end if
end tell
If you really want it, there is also a delete command. But that circumvents the trash and deletes directly with no undo, so be cautious. I wouldn’t recommend it.
Sorry. I missed you were referring to annotation files.
No you can’t put annotation files in a subgroup. It’s either the same or the shared group.
It seems you have a workflow issue, not a technological one. Why don’t you start a master meeting document, e.g., rich text, then copy and paste item links into it as needed? In fact, you could copy text, then using Edit > Paste with Source Link(Shift-Command-V) in the meeting document.
