The second season update this summer is DEVONthink Pro (Office). It adds minor improvements to almost all areas of DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office. DEVONthink Professional Office 1.3.2 supports MailTags 2.0 notes, allows to set the resolution and the compression of PDFs, and connects to ExactCode’s ExactScan software. Both editions allow you to set the background color of rich text documents, support grouping of found documents directly from within Classify and See Also drawers, and read Finder and Spotlight comments when sync’ing an indexed folder. The Dashboard widgets look way more attractive now, too.

If you need to get table-like data into DEVONthink Pro or out of it, nothing easier than that. From, e.g., Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice export your data as tab-separated or comma-separated values (.tsv, .csv). Import this into DEVONthink Pro and it will automagically appear as a sheet. To get a sheet out of DEVONthink, select it (not the individual records) and choose File > Export > As Files and Folders. It will get exported as tab-separated values that can be read by all spreadsheet applications on any platform.

If you receive a file that you cannot open because you don’t have the right piece of software at hand, or if you want to convert a file in a proprietary format for importing into DEVONthink, have a look at Zamzar, a free Web-based file conversion service that converts diverse document, image, audio, and video formats.

One of our users (thank you, Martin!) posted a few days ago that he notices that on the Author’s Note page (p. 414) in Michael Chabon’s new best seller novel, “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” Chabon writes: “This novel was written on Macintosh computers using Devonthink Pro and Nisus Writer Express.” Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001 for his novel “Kavalier & Clay.” As we’ve not sponsored Mr. Chabon for putting us in there, we’re more than honored for the mentioning. If you are interested, here's a link to his novel at Amazon (no affiliate link, just for quick reference.)

Why-o-ever it may happen, databases can go corrupt. Be it a damaged file system, a system hang, or, Heaven forbid!, a DEVONthink crash. But, no reason to panic. First, run Tools > Verify & Repair. If DEVONthink cannot repair the database or if you are sure that you’ve lost some data, it’s time for the internal backups. By default, DEVONthink keeps two internal backups of the database index files that you can revert to at any time. (more)

Innowen from DIY Planner has published a nice review of DEVONthink Pro. She nicely describes how she uses DEVONthink but does also mention the downfalls for her. Here’s her conclusion:

That said, if you need an excellent all-in-one research assistant/personal information manager on your Macintosh system, then DEVONthink is the one for you. It’s fast, reliable, is able to index, cross-reference, search, handles almost all file formats natively and makes coffee for you in the morning (okay, it doesn’t… but DTPro could do that if it wanted to) … (more)

With Bookends 9.2 it’s now possible to create links from DEVONthink to an entry in Bookends. Simply drag an ID number of a reference into a rich text document. This creates a special URL that opens the corresponding Bookends reference when clicked. In addition, you can drag the ID into DEVONthink’s groups and documents list which the creates a link document for the reference. DEVONthink Pro Office 1.3.1, DEVONthink Pro 1.3.1, and DEVONthink Personal 1.9.9 add special support for this and name the link document automatically.

No Tuesday Tip, but a Wednesday Announcement. We’re proud to tell you that we’ve agreed with the German capture software manufacturer ExactScan to work closer together. Their ExactScan software allows you to connect one of the fast Avision scanners to your Mac and feed scanned documents directly into DEVONthink Pro Office. Just as we already did with the Fujitsu ScanSnap. Avision makes low-end to high-end auto-feeder scanners with scan speeds of up to 100 pages (50 sheets) per minute. So if you’re into serious paper capture, check them out.

DEVONthink Personal users: You’re not forgotten! As promised last week, we have just released DEVONthink Personal 1.9.9 with all the little enhancements that we had added to DEVONthink Pro in the last months. In addition, we have released DEVONagent 2.1 with a number of really nice features, for example the possibility to access your bookmarks right from the Dock menu and thumbnail tooltips for tabs. Finally, we’ve published maintenance updates for DEVONthink Pro 1.3.1 and DEVONthink Pro Office. Download the new versions here and simply replace your copies with the new ones.

A less well-known keyboard shortcut that works in nearly every Mac OS X application including DEVONthink is Alt-Tab. It switches forward through all panes of the frontmost window. In DEVONthink Pro’s Three Panes view, for example, from: groups to documents to the view/edit pane and back to groups.