DEVONthink Pro features its own document type for tabular data named ‘sheet’. Sheets resemble spreadsheets and can hold textual data organized in rows and columns. Create a new sheet with Data > New > Sheet, name it, and add some columns with Data > Sheet > New Column or Edit Columns. (more)

Steven Berlin Johnson is an avid advocate for DEVONthink. In another recent article in the Prospect magazine he wrote about copy-and-paste writing and using software as part of the creative process:

The software [DEVONthink] also acts as a kind of connection machine, helping to supplement your own memory. The results have a certain chaotic brilliance. In my last book, for instance, while researching Joseph Priestley’s experiments with oxygen, Devonthink reminded me of a wonderful passage from Lynn Margulis’s book, Microcosmos, which talked about the way excess oxygen, created by early photosynthesis, became one of the earth’s first pollution crises. I had read the passage years before, but forgotten it entirely. The programme remade the link, and opened up an line of inquiry that ultimately resulted in an entirely new chapter. (more)

In the presumably hopeless attempt to separate between the official DEVONtechnologies news and my personal replies and comments I have just switched this blog’s auto-tweet function to our company’s corporate Twitter account. If you are following me but want to receive official news, too, please follow @devontech (and if you only want to read those, feel free to un-follow me, of course).

When you add your documents and clippings to DEVONthink, you’re never locked in. DEVONthink provides you with a variety of export options based on standard file formats, not obscure XML constructs or even proprietary file formats. Whatever you store in DEVONthink, you’ll get it out in exactly that format again. (more)

Long-standing readers will know that I like to work in local coffee shops and cafés. This January the first Starbucks opened in my area, about 20km north of Stuttgart, Germany. So I just had to try it — see the picture below. Reasonable coffee, agreed. But: WiFi was not yet operational and Starbucks in Germany does not offer it for free but you need to either pay by the minute or have a T-Mobile or T-Online subscription. Dear Starbucks, welcome to the 21st century — time to reconsider this antique concept. (more)

This morning a 17 year old boy killed ten pupils, three teachers, and three other people in his former school in Winnenden, less than 25 kilometers from where I live and work, north of Stuttgart, Germany. Me, my wife, and our children are spending this evening disturbed, watching the news and talking about the unbelievable.

With DEVONthink Pro 2.x’s ability to keep more than one database open at the same time you might consider splitting your older huge all-in-one database. The most effective way to do this is:

Alternatively you can drag the items to the other database’s name in the sidebar. In this case the items will end up in that database’s local inbox and you can move them from there to the database’s top level. (more)

DEVONthink 2.0 uses QuickLook for displaying file formats that it cannot show directly, e.g. Pages, Numbers, or .eml email documents. While this allows DEVONthink to display all files for which a QuickLook plugin is available, many previews don’t allow you to select text, e.g. for copying it. This is where the plain text view comes in. Switch to the plain text view using the plain text view icon in the document’s navigation bar if available. (more)

From time to time I tend to share a nice comment from a fellow user. This week, power user and Windows convert Stephen Barnes sent us this email:

I have now been using Devonthink Pro for a couple of months, having moved over from the Window environment. I would just like to say that the move to using a Mac has been fully justified by Devonthink alone. What a lovely program you have! On the Windows side I used Info Select for years, then Paperport, and then UltraRecall. Devonthink is much more pleasurable to use than any of those products. Thank you for such an excellent piece of software. (more)

Quick notice: We have just released an interim update to DEVONthink Pro Office 2.0 that brings a large number of improvements to the embedded text recognition that we did not want to hold back until public beta 4 because it fixes many known issues.