Getting Started Using Personal Knowbase for Miscellaneous Notes

A common purpose for starting to use Personal Knowbase is to take control of all the miscellaneous information that passes through our lives. Collected observations and ideas. Captured thoughts and conversations. They accumulate on bits of paper on our desk, in our drawers, or in boxes of 3x5 index cards. Or they may be scattered around your hard drive in emails and small text files in multiple software formats.

Many notes are not associated with a person or a date, so storing them in contact management software doesn't make sense. But we know they may be useful later, if only we can find them when we need them.

Reading Personal Knowbase Files over a Network

If you need multiple users to be able to read the same Personal Knowbase data file (KNO file), you may find it useful to place the data file on a network. A centrally located data file on a network allows any user with a computer connected to the network to read the data.

Using Personal Knowbase for Contact Management

A common use for Personal Knowbase is to store contact and address information. Create a Personal Knowbase "index card" file for your contacts.

In Personal Knowbase's terminology, we refer to each "index card" as an "article". Make an article for each contact containing all information and notes about that person, company, or organization. You can easily sort, print, search, index, and filter the list of entries.

Creating a Writing Snippets File with Personal Knowbase

Do you regularly delete perfectly good pieces of writing while editing? Do you have frequent "false starts" when you begin a writing project and stall? Do you have old unfinished attempts accumulating on your computer or in notebooks?

Consider keeping a writing snippets file where you can store miscellaneous pieces that don't have a home. You never know when these writings may be exactly what you need for a future project. And storing them away is less painful than deleting them.

Using PK Reader to Share Information with Students

Teachers, are you ready for the new school season? For ideas about organizing your notes and records, see our previous post on how Personal Knowbase can help educators stay organized.

But Personal Knowbase can also help you share information with your students. Using the Personal Knowbase Reader software provides a handy way to distribute materials. Whether you're in the classroom or teaching online from a virtual classroom, you need creative and secure ways to disseminate materials to your students.

Personal Knowbase Stay-at-Home Project Ideas

Many of us are finding unstructured time on our hands while on lockdown, quarantine, or shelter in place. Our last post outlined general productivity tips to help cope during "Shelter in Place".

If you decide to use your self-isolation time to start a project (or make progress on a previously languishing project), create a Personal Knowbase data file for it and collect all its notes in one place. Personal Knowbase's freeform note management system can help with organizing the related notes, research, and records. Use it to keep track of related website accounts and online resources. Attach related files to the corresponding PK articles.

Using Personal Knowbase to Organize Recipes

Whether you're an ardent chef, you're gathering together all your extended family's recipes, you're studying mixology, or you just bake occasionally for holidays, Personal Knowbase provides a natural and flexible way to organize your recipes. Collect all your recipes in one place where you can access them on your computer, print them, or export them to text files.

Here are some ideas for setting up a PK data file for your recipes.

Running PK Reader from a CD

Personal Knowbase Reader is a read-only viewer for files which are created using the Personal Knowbase note management software. You can set up PK Reader to run from a write-once removable disk, such as a CD-R, so that it automatically loads a Knowbase data file.

Using Personal Knowbase as Index Card Software

Since the 1980's, we've been using personal computers to replace tasks that we used to do with pen and paper. We used paper index cards for many purposes from research to recipes. Now we put that information on our computer.

Although we now enter most information directly into our computers, the structure of the data often still resembles how index card systems used to work. We have digitized our index card projects.

Personal Knowbase Helps Educators Stay Organized

It's Back-to-School time again! Personal Knowbase is a great software tool for organizing notes and records. Following are six ways that PK can help educators get organized.

Personal Knowbase is a note management program for Windows. It stores information in free-format notes which it refers to as "articles." Assigning keywords to your articles indexes them for easy access based on your customized criteria.