Project Center vs. DEVONthink

[James]

I'm debating with myself about whether or not I should get a DEVONthink
Pro licence before I go off to do my PhD in September.

Basically I'm wondering about whether or not the copy of Office 2004
that I've already paid for might not be a viable alternative,
specifically with regards to the Project Center.

Does anyone here use PC? Under what scenarios? I've had a bit of a play
around with it lately and it seems like it's very useful with handling
any kind of project that involves a lot of communication with other
people, tasks and so on; but it doesn't appear to handle clippings very
well.

From what I can see from the various help files, to add a clipping from
any app outside the Office suite (eg Safari), you have to first enter
it into the scrapbook and then add it as a clipping from within the PC.
This seems quite clunky to me. There are a few other drawbacks as well,
such as the fact that I can't seem to get a full-size preview of
anything clipped from the clipboard (it only shows the thumbnail).

Basically, I would like to have an app that stores things like images,
PDF files, etc. that is easy to access and has the capability to search
within those files. Does anybody out there use the Project Center for
anything along these lines, or am I misinterpreting what it was
designed for?

Thanks!

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

You will find a little bit more if you google the entourage group, though
previous renditions of this question have not gotten much response.
http://groups.google.com/groups?group=microsoft.public.mac.office.entourage
(at least one person is exceedingly happy with it, though)

In addition, I think that Project Center vs. DEVONthink is in many ways a
personal choice (any software choice is, really), so the general question
about which program is not going to get an especially definitive answer.
You need to experiment with both. Having found some limitations of the PC,
the entourage group would be a good place to instead ask specifically about
things you need to do--e.g. fast ways to get a webpage from Safari into the
project center. For instance, I'm guessing that's a problem scripting could
help with, there's an active scripting community on that group.

But it may be worth paying for DEVONthink because they've already solved all
those specific needs.

I'm not totally sure how clippings work (or even what you mean by clipping,
really)--but I know for Safari links, it's possible to drag the URL icon
from the address bar into a folder on the desktop that is linked to the
project center, and then they show up as files that launch the page on
double-click. Dragging clippings might work similarly.

I do not think the Project Center has the capability to search inside the
text of PDF files, and don't think it ever will, since Spotlight can.

From what I hear about Devonthink, people love it, and for a Ph.D. program,
it is likely a wise investment. Isn't there a demo you can try? (and I
assume they have a student price--nearly everyone does)

Good luck with the Ph.D.!

 

[Michel Bintener]

Just a couple of additional comments... There are two things which I don't
like about Project Center:

One major annoyance is the fact that there is no checkbox to mark a project
as finished. So if you keep a project in the Project Center after it has
been completed, you'll see that terrible "Overdue" text in bright red
letters, even though your project is NOT overdue. So it would be really nice
to have a checkbox to mark a project as complete, instead of having no
option but to delete a project once the deadline has been reached. Comments
about this show up frequently on the Entourage newsgroup, so it's not just
me complaining about this.

Another thing which annoys me, and this is partly in response to James'
comment about not being able to add certain files to DEVONthink: Entourage
doesn't accept every file, either. I frequently use applications which store
their files in packages rather than binary file formats: Pages, for
instance, OmniOutliner and CircusPonies' NoteBook. And since files created
by these applications are not strictly speaking files, but folders
containing several files, Entourage doesn't recognise them as files and
refuses to add them to a project. There is of course a workaround, creating
ZIP files for these folders and then adding the ZIP files to the Project
Center, but this somehow defies its purpose, which is to regroup various
files within one single location for easy access. So that's another feature
request for Office 12: make Entourage recognise packages as files.

I've never used DEVONthink, and my needs are not that extravagant, but I
just thought I should point out a few deficiencies of Entourage's Project
Center, as I really like that feature and I think it needs some improvement
for the next revision of Office.

 

[James Stover]

As Michel mentioned, I want to be able to mark a project "Completed", but
still keep the project around for reference to the files, notes, etc. as I
need to refer back to the data.

I need to mention a mistake in my previous post about DEVONthink. I got an
e-mail from their support group (who responded pretty quickly I might add)
and they explained how DEVONthink can allow adding other file types that it
doesn't understand.

From DEVONthink support:
"Just open the preferences, "Import" tab. Check "Create links to
unknown file types". Also check "Copy files to database folder" if
you want DEVONthink to keep your Finale files inside its database
folder/package."

I tried it and it works fine.

Jim Stover