Thanks, Bill, for your response and also for the helpful workflow ideas in your post. Of course, different people and different projects need different workflows. I prefer to focus on writing myself, but it took me a long time to get used to the way DevonThink works. This piece of software encouraged me to organize my material electronically. Since I had never tried that before, I tried to develop habits - or “workflows” - that would assist me not only in finding the stuff in the database, but also to generate new ideas. Since I did my research with “paper tools” before, it took some time to weed out some routines, which are superfluous in the digital world (like the Luhmann-style numbers for internal wiki-links I used at first). It has worked so far, but I am still looking for ways and tools which can assist the process of thinking and writing.
As most typewriter-owners woud agree, every novelist works differently, but their workflows usually have more in common than, say, the workflow of a biography-writer or an economist. Experimenting with new techniques might even help to generate new ideas, or get past writers block, or just assemble your research.
I hope my workflow suggestions in the forum did not sound “preachy” - after all, you are the evangelist, right? I do not think there is one perfect workflow - it would be disastrous to focus only on this part of the work - but the vast possibilities of this software still make me wonder how to use it to my advantage. Every option in itself is perfectly easy to understand - ruler, wiki-link, search also - but as the saying goes, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so I am always glad to hear about new and innovative ways to explore patterns in my data, instead of just having the data in a kind of repository.
The vast menu options of DT remind me of Photoshop or Final Cut: There are usually many ways to achieve a certain effect, but it takes practise to find the shortest route.While the users of these applications have books, videos and courses for their application, we have the help file, the forums, and, hey, we have you!
I am really curious about the way you use hyperlinked rich text notes: If these links you use are not wiki-links, do they refer to external sources like websites or to other documents in your database?
And how do you shuffle their order? I know that in the view otions, you can set the sorting order to “unsorted” and drag your documents the way you like, but this is reverted all the time I switch back to “ordered”. Now that I experiment with it, I see that the Program seems to remember the way I sorted it - the custom order is still there after unsorting. Is there a way to keep certain folders “unsorted” and others sorted?
The last question is about the exporting of the part of the project. If you use the “export” feature, do the links still work in the new database or are they broken? Thanks for sharing!