learning Ultra Recall

Posted by bboyd
Oct 24, 2007 at 08:20 PM

Rather than hijack the whizfolders topic, let me start a new thread to pursue a comment made there by quant, and ask about Ultra Recall.

quant said:
>I have the same feeling about UltraRecall, with custom
>attributes/templates/saved searches/forms/hoisting and second to none Customer
>support it is a product hard to beat!
> >But at the same time I think to myself, that it’s
>not me who is losing for not using such a great product ;-) and great products don’t
>really need to be advertised or talked about

I’m slowly moving towards giving up on OneNote in favor of Ultra Recall, for a number of reasons. Primarily because OneNote simply doesn’t work as well as a number of other programs at importing web pages, but more specifically because I’m attracted by Ultra Recall’s database power. I thought I could live with OneNote’s folders, and I’ll still have a use for them, but - for me - the tree just makes more sense for the way I think and organize. I thought OneNote’s linking ability would be enough, but UR is much stronger and, even better, the ability to show parents and children together with the main info item is especially helpful. Not least because you can click on any parent or child and see its own parents and children. And make new connections if need be. (This is not unlike the theme of the ConnectText thread, but UR is certainly not a wiki. It does perhaps have greater appeal to those of us who like our data more regimented, though.)

Once you get your mind around what quant mentions, attributes/templates/saved searches/forms/hoisting, it becomes clear that the potential of UR is considerable. I’m already very happy with how I can adapt it to my very particular needs.

But the learning curve does seem to be daunting when hoping to extract the greater good from UR, so this is where I’m asking if I’ve missed something. Like a decent owner’s manual, beyond the Help pages provided. I’m amazed at how customizable the program is, and how one can devise templates with any field one chooses. But it took me forever to figure it out on my own, mostly gleaning clues from the forum, that to create or amend a template one has to first set up attributes, then set up a form consisting of those attributes, then bring that form into a template. I’m barely an amateur with a program like MS Access, so I feel lucky to have figured out this much about UR.

Having done so, I’m very impressed with how I can make it exactly right for what I need. Those of you who are veterans: may I ask how you got there? I’d love to have better explanations for some of its powerful features than I can now find, but the current support pages seem to assume too much.

One last thing about quant’s quote above: I can share the feeling that it’s not me who is losing for not using such a great product, but it would be great to have more people be talking about it, not just to expand the user base and thus keep the developer in business, but to expand the knowledge base as well. When I searched UR here in this forum, there are many references to it, but not as much detailed discussion as there is with some other programs.