Devonian Times Masthead

The DEVONtechnologies Blog

Articles in the category Tips

September 30, 2014

Quickly Open a Related Group

Sometimes you are working along in DEVONthink and realize you want to check out something in the same group, or maybe a group in the same hierarchy. Command-click the name in the title bar of a document window to show a dropdown of the hierarchy the file resides in. Clicking one of the locations will open it in a new window leaving your current window open behind it. (more)

September 23, 2014

Train Your Spell Checker

The built-in spell checker in OS X is quite handy and available from within all Mac apps including DEVONthink. But there are many times when it thinks you’ve misspelled something when you know you haven’t. And while it may be nothing but a cosmetic annoyance to see the dashed red line under a word, you may want to teach the spell checker a thing or two. (more)

August 26, 2014

Import from Instapaper

Getting your articles from Instapaper to DEVONthink automatically isn’t straightforward, unfortunately. Power user and former DEVONtechnologies crew member Annard Brouwer has written a great little script that takes a CSV file exported from Instapaper, converts it using Numbers, and imports the cleaned up result to DEVONthink Pro or Pro Office. (more)

August 19, 2014

Save Tabs to DEVONthink with these Scripts

DEVONthink power user Veritrope has created two new scripts that creates a list of all the pages currently open in tabs in Safari or Chrome. So with a single click you have saved all your tabs in a single HTML document in DEVONthink Pro (Office) and you can re-visit the pages later at any time. Download the Safari script and the Chrome script from his homepage. Veritrope has many more scripts and tips for dealing with browser tabs.

August 5, 2014

Toggle the Sorter with a Hotkey

Some of you have expressed the desire for a hotkey to show or hide the DEVONthink Sorter. Instead of waiting for us to implement yet another hotkey, you can easily do it yourself.

Now you can start and stop the Sorter as your leisure. Note that you can use this to start and stop e.g. the Web Sharing server in DEVONthink Pro Office, too. Also, note that this method can be used in applications other than ours. You just need a menu item that toggles between two states. (more)

June 3, 2014

A Little More 'Helpful' Help Menu

One of the most overlooked menus in any application is the Help menu. Not only is it the best place to start looking for, well… help, but here’s a way to use it you might not have thought of. (more)

May 16, 2014

New Academic Templates

DEVONthink Pro Office power user Luc Beaulieu has created a few standard templates for some key academic activities: Research grants, research contracts, general research projects, new students, new manuscripts, and conferences. And this is how Luc’s workflow looks like: … (more)

May 13, 2014

What's Your Favorite?

As you work in DEVONthink, you’ll come to find yourself going to the same places over and over again. It may be opening a certain database, working in a certain project, or other daily uses. These are perfect items to add to your Sidebar Favorites. (more)

April 29, 2014

Manage Your E-Books in DEVONthink

Out-of-the-box DEVONthink displays and searches many file formats including PDF or Office documents. For files it doesn’t understand it uses Quick Look and Spotlight to make their proprietary content usable. With these two free plugins you can add the .epub file format to your system. As soon as you’ve installed the plugins, DEVONthink shows at least book covers, finds books by their content, and converts them to plain text. (more)

April 22, 2014

Find Indexed Instances

If you want to copy a database to an external drive it’s useful to know which items you have imported and which are just indexed. To find out in DEVONthink Pro or Pro Office, open the Search window (Tools > Search). Leave the query field blank, check Search for: All. Now click the Advanced button and enter these criteria: All of the following are true; Kind is Any Document; Instance is (not) Indexed. Click OK to start the search. (more)