Newbie seeking improvement on present method of work...

Hello all.

I am a newbie who is considering the purchase of UR. Before I proceed to download the trial version, I would like to ask members here:

i) if they can illustrate (explain) to me how the use of UR will be able to improve or streamline my present work method?
(example below)

ii) if they have any ideas on how UR can be used in ways well in advance of my data capture process?

iii) how ii) might be undertaken with use of Copernic while retaining the present folder & file structure (data storage & retrieval)?

My present method of research (data capture) means that
I select numerous documents via a search engine -word, pdf etc- copy&paste them into the relevant hard disk folder, then proceed to name(code) each of them according to my categorization scheme. Unlike pdfs, for both the .doc and the many.txt documents used for the placing of an assortment of links, I am required to perform the additional actions of creating a new document. (file-new-select type-paste-perform some light formatting-name).My indexer, Copernic, works well for retrieval.

I have checked the archives, but I have been left a little confused by the somewhat complex nature of some of the answers.




Thanks.

[TimP]

I guess you're not getting much back on your request because it's so very general.

While I don't have time to produce a procedure for you, I've done pretty much what you're doing and only for less than two weeks. Download your files as usual, rename your files. Then you could import them into UR. Depending on your settings (which is the tricky part), the import will result in the creation of a tree node for each file which either contains or points to each of your files. Poof! If you've set your options to view/edit your PDFs internally, clicking on a tree node will cause the file to display in the detail pane.

To manage my research references, I've not imported the external files, but manually created an item for each that I've examined and found relevant. I created a custom template and custom form for my references that carries the meta data I want to be associated to each reference (retrieval date, publish date, stuff like that) and then dragged-and-dropped the file into the item detail area thus creating a clickable link to the file. I then put the formal reference text in the item detail area, along with the article abstract and my assessment of its relevance, because the form font is a tad small for my old eyes.

All of this worked pretty well for me pretty quickly because I've come from Treepad, another structured note-taker/outliner/PIM product. You're just going to have to play around with a few arrangements until you're satisfied that you've got a reasonable workflow and your data is cleanly stored, visible and searchable. The beauty of this product is its flexibility, which induces complexity for sure, but allows it to adapt to many different approaches.

Good luck.