PK Tip: Merging Keywords

Occasionally, you may discover that you have two (or more) keywords in your Personal Knowbase data file that are redundant. Plurals, alternate spellings, and abbreviations are common culprits.

PK Tip: Suppressing the Warning Message for Saving Articles

When you first start using Personal Knowbase, the software always asks you to verify that you want to save an article when you close it. As you become more familiar with the software, you may find these verification dialog boxes unnecessary, perhaps annoying.

The dialog box itself gives you the option to stop showing it for the rest of the current PK session. However, the next time you start up PK again, the warning dialogs will be back.

If you find yourself always disabling these dialog boxes, you may want to turn them off permanently and never see them again.

PK Tip: Finding Text across Multiple Knowbase Data Files

Personal Knowbase has no built-in way to search for a text string across multiple data files.

However, within a single PK session, the Find dialog box remembers its settings, even after you've opened a different file. So you can search for the same string using the same range and search settings by opening each data file consecutively and re-running Find without changing the settings.

PK Tip: Opening a File Automatically at Startup

Did you know that you can make Personal Knowbase automatically open a specific data file whenever it starts up?

To specify a file to open at startup:

PK Tip: Dragging Text into Personal Knowbase

You can drag whole blocks of text from most other Windows applications directly into Personal Knowbase's Index Window to create a new article.

PK Tip: Importing HTML (Or Other Formatted) Files as Text

A recent tip explained how to export a Personal Knowbase article as an HTML code snippet. What if you want to go in the other direction and import a snippet of HTML code from an HTML file to save in PK for future use as HTML code?

If you import the file as an HTML file, PK removes the HTML code and converts the formatting to its internal rich-text formatting. You end up with just the text without the HTML code.

PK Tip: Exporting HTML Code Snippets

One common use for Personal Knowbase is to store code snippets, specifically in this case HTML code snippets.

However, if you try to export an article containing HTML using the export file type HTML Files, you end up with garbage. For example, let's say you have an article containing this text:

PK Tip: Using the Compact Command for Maintenance and Repair

In these days of large, cheap hard drives, most of us don't feel any need to compact a database file to save disk space.

But Personal Knowbase's Compact command does more than reduce your data file to its minimum size. Here are three additional tasks Compact can help you with:

PK Tip: Copying Articles from One Knowbase File to Another

Sometimes you may find it useful to copy (or move) articles from one Knowbase data file to another. You may want to break a data file into two smaller files, or to create a new file containing only a small subset of the articles in a larger file (for example, to share those articles with a friend or colleague). Or you may want to move old, obsolete articles to an "archive" data file.

PK Tip: Avoiding Changing a Data File

When browsing a Personal Knowbase data file — opening and closing articles while checking or looking for something — you can easily make changes accidentally.

If you realize you've made a change to an article that you didn't want to change, you can immediately return the article to its last saved state. While the article window is still open, select the Undo Article Changes command from the Edit menu.

But if you know that you don't want to make changes to a file before you open it, it's safer to open the file in Read-Only mode to start with. In Read-Only mode, you have no risk of making unwanted changes. You will not be able to modify existing articles or create new ones.