Data - In & Out

Posted by Jan Rifkinson
Jan 31, 2007 at 02:41 PM

Like many of you I’ve probaby tried in excess of 2 dozen ‘data” programs, from note takers to data gatherers. What amazes me about many of these programs is that developers/programmers—although very talented & inventive when it comes to options within the programs—forget that getting the program into the data base should be as painless & inventive as possible.

If the user has to go thru several steps of copying opening/switching/pasting, blah, blah, blah… the workflow is interrupted. The most talented programs in this regard, i.e. getting data into the database(s) is Zoot & ADM. MyInfo is gaining ground for v4. But take an interesting (IMO) program like Connected Text. While I could see how easy it was to link things to each other & visualize them a variety of ways, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out an easy way to get data into the program. Even common importing strategies like csv format seems to be forgotten, likewise for exporting data.

Exporting is the other half of the problem, i.e. allowing you & others to use the data you’ve collected w/o owning your same program(s)..

A slight digresssion is the use of date/time. For some reason many developers associated w this kind of software seem to equate data/time/reminders/popups, etc as PIM functions that they want to stay away from. I don’t understand this reasoning because it seems to me that the more data you gather/organize, the more important it is to be able to prioritze & schedule it as much as possible otherwise you get overrun by (drown in) data. This is especially true when it comes to gathering/organizing data for a specific project, be it an article you are researching/writing or a construction project or gathering info for a website, keeping records of your gardens, photography. The list is endless.

What programs have you all experimented/use that have good data in/out functions w some kind of calendar/time functions besides Outlook which I refuse to use.

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Jan Rifkinson
Ridgefield, CT USA