FAQ: Personal Knowbase Features

• What files do I need to back up to protect my PK data?
• Can I open multiple Knowbase files at once?
• How many articles can Personal Knowbase hold?
• How many keywords can Personal Knowbase hold?
• How large can a Personal Knowbase article be?
• Can I insert images into my articles?
• Can I export my articles to a tabled or delimited format?
• Can I use my scanner to scan pages into PK?

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Mainly, you need to backup the “KNO” data files. Custom import formats and file attachments are also separate files. For complete information, please see our help topic Backing Up and Restoring Data Files.

You can have as many copies (instances) of Personal Knowbase open at once as you need, each viewing a different Knowbase (KNO) file.

Note, however, that if you make changes to the user Preferences in one copy, it won't affect other copies. The last copy of the program to be closed determines which Preferences and window locations are saved.

There is no set limit to the number of articles that you can store in a Knowbase data file.

There may be file size limitations due to your hardware type or Windows version. For example, if you store your files on a USB drive, note that many USB drives limit file sizes to 4 GB.

In files with very large numbers (tens of thousands) of articles, you may notice delays in program response when displaying the Index Window, searching, or exporting. When you notice slowness will depend on your computer speed.

There is no set limit to the number of keywords that you can store in a Knowbase data file.

In files with very large numbers of keywords, you may notice delays in program response when displaying the Index Window. When you notice slowness will depend on your computer speed.

Users have reported delays displaying the keyword lists when the number of keywords exceeds about 10,000.

There is no set limit to the size of a Personal Knowbase article.

When working with very large articles, you will encounter slowness when displaying the article, saving it, or exporting a group of articles which includes the large article. At what size you experience delays in program response will depend on the speed of your computer, its memory, and your version of Windows.

We have tested with an article containing over 17 million characters (17 MB), and opening and working with that article was very slow.

If you start having problems with response time, consider dividing each large article into multiple smaller articles.

No, Personal Knowbase does not support graphics inside articles. It works only with text information. You can link to external graphics files using article attachments or hypertext links.

When article attachments link to image files, thumbnails of the images are displayed along the bottom of the Article Window when the Image Gallery option is turned on.

Yes. You can export Personal Knowbase articles to standard CSV files. Simply select the Export command, use the Export What options to choose which article attributes to export, then export to file type CSV (Comma-Separated Values).

You can load the resulting file into a spreadsheet program or import it to a database program. Text formatting is removed.

Personal Knowbase does not include its own scanner or OCR (optical character recognition) functionality, but it interfaces easily with most OCR programs which work with paper scanners. How this interface works depends on the abilities of your OCR program. Once you have scanned or imported your documents into Personal Knowbase, you can assign keywords to each document so that you can easily find the pages you need. In this way, Personal Knowbase can be used as a simple document manager.

For more information, please see our help topic Using OCR Software with Personal Knowbase.