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Main Area and Open Discussion => General Software Discussion => Topic started by: kalos on April 29, 2012, 08:54 AM

Title: research tool
Post by: kalos on April 29, 2012, 08:54 AM

hello!

I want to research (gather information) on 20 subjects/questions. That means that for each subject/question, I will copy text from various sources, extract pdf pages, crop parts of pdf pages, copy images, tables, etc from the web, MS Office documents, etc, and put all of them together, so I will process them later, to produce a report/response to the subject/question.

Is there a software that can help me manage the research of those 20 subjects?

Maybe MS Word can do this, but:
- I want to easily go through the info I gathered for each subject, and not do endless scrolling (unless MS Word can create an outline or something, so when I click on a specific subject, to display the gathered material on that subject)
- I want to easily add material of various formats, pdf, images, tables, text, without any problem (eg without pdf text's format to break, etc)

any suggestion?

thanks!

Title: Re: research tool
Post by: c.gingerich on April 29, 2012, 10:45 AM

I use a very great app called WebResearch Pro 3. I think that it would work for what you are asking. http://www.macropool.com/en/products/webresearch/index.html (http://www.macropool.com/en/products/webresearch/index.html)

Title: Re: research tool
Post by: tomos on April 29, 2012, 11:06 AM

@c.gingerich, WebResearch Pro looks very nice - can it save PDFs (or other filetypes) as well?

I will ... extract pdf pages ...
[..]
- I want to easily add material of various formats, pdf, images, tables, text, without any problem (eg without pdf text's format to break, etc)

-kalos (April 29, 2012, 08:54 AM)

you will probably have trouble with the PDFs (as usual ;)) - some PIMs will save a PDF within the file, or link to the file, but I've never heard of an app like this that will extract pages from a PDF. Copying text from a PDF is usually a disaster from the format point of view AFAIK.
But maybe someone will know of something out there that can help...

Title: Re: research tool
Post by: kalos on April 29, 2012, 11:07 AM

mmm

it seems interesting, but the first obstacle I encountered, is that I cannot import the subjects easily, I have to do it one by one (20++)

:/

Title: Re: research tool
Post by: c.gingerich on April 29, 2012, 11:18 AM

Ah.. I see. I use it on the fly as I find things and such. I use Yahoo messenger and I can drag and drop  text from that.

Title: Re: research tool
Post by: rgdot on April 29, 2012, 11:57 AM

I have never really needed extraction, but for example TreeProjects has a feature called 'special folder monitoring' where any file you drop into it will be imported into TreeProjects automatically and it has inline preview of PDF files.

Title: Re: research tool
Post by: kalos on April 29, 2012, 12:06 PM

TreeProjects and WebResearch seems to be about the same apps, how are such programs called? I want to search for other alternatives, in case I find something that fits me better

EDIT: I also found programs called outliners, that seem alot like what I need, any opinion?

Title: Re: research tool
Post by: joiwind on April 29, 2012, 12:16 PM

@kalos : search for Knowledge Base or similar, that may be the sort of thing you're looking for ...
You could also check out Docear (http://www.docear.org/software/details/)

Title: Re: research tool
Post by: kalos on April 29, 2012, 04:33 PM

so far, from my research and tests, MyInfo seems to do the job nicely