Looking for information manager that combines strengths of X1, Evernote, TreeProjects, GloboNote, My Notes Keeper, Clipboard Help & Spell,

Posted by MadaboutDana
Nov 13, 2014 at 10:34 AM

My son, a budding film director, pretty much lives in EssentialPIM, rather to my amusement. It has its quirks, but it’s a very impressive application, especially if you want to store a lot of data. Having said that, I’ve always been somewhat dissatisfied with its search function, which isn’t quite as comprehensive or stable as it could be.

Possibly the best search engine ever, anywhere, is the one built into Adobe Reader. This is capable of searching through multiple PDF files in multiple folders (including subfolders), producing a useful list of ALL the results (with a bit of surrounding text for contextual purposes), and highlighting the results in the individual PDFs. All this without indexing. When you stop and think of just how clever that is, it’s actually quite breathtaking.

Speed is something of an issue, but the more you use it, the faster Adobe Reader’s search function works. So for example, I keep dedicated repositories of PDFs for different clients. If I want to search through my reference texts for a particular client, I simply point Adobe Reader’s search function at the set of folders I’ve dedicated to that client. As I keep searching for stuff in there, the searches become faster and faster, presumably because AR uses a cache function.

The good thing is, it’s easy to turn more or less any file into a PDF. On a PC, you can use a “print to…” app like CutePDF. On a Mac, you can generate PDFs as a matter of course (it’s built-in). So if you’re looking for a solution that’s not app-dependent, using pure PDFs is a good option. Not least because Adobe Reader isn’t the only piece of software that can search rapidly through lots of PDFs. On a PC, you could use e.g. Copernic Desktop or X1. On a Mac, you could use Spotlight or FoxTrot Pro. And there are plenty of other PDF apps out there, too (like the brilliant PDF Xchange Editor for PC, for example).

Cheers,
Bill