Cleaning off Your Desk with Personal Knowbase

Today is National Clean Off Your Desk Day, which falls on the second Monday of January every year. Personal Knowbase can't help you get rid of old pens, half-used batteries, and that broken coffee mug. But it can help you tidy up all those scattered bits of paper.

As part of your efforts, try this:

PK Tip: Typing in the Index Column

In Personal Knowbase, normally we locate keywords in the Index column by clicking them with the mouse. But we can also locate keywords using the keyboard. Typing to locate keywords can save you from constant scrolling in long lists of keywords.

When the highlighted cursor focus (when the highlight has a dotted outline) is in the Index column, you can type the first few letters of a keyword to move the highlight to that keyword in the list. So, for example, if you type "sm", the highlight will move to the first keyword starting with "sm".

Computer Basics: 3 Tips for Effective Backups

Disaster can strike at any time, whether it's computer failure, fire, or human error. For anyone doing computer work that involves creating new data — whether your work is writing, business and finance, or programming — backing up your files is critical. Even losing a day's worth of writing or artwork can be devastating.

Keeping safe backups of all of your original data is important.

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.

PK Tips for Portable Mode Installation

If you need to carry your notes between computers, you can use Personal Knowbase's portability feature to install the software on a USB thumb drive or other removable media. If you're having trouble getting PK to install in portable mode, here are a couple things to check.

Productivity Tips: 5 Tips for Focusing on Your Work

Lack of concentration can cause serious problems with our ability to get work done and, more importantly, how well we do our work. If we are constantly unfocused, distracted, and interrupted, the quantity and quality of our work falls. Here are 5 tips to help you focus.

PK Tip: Quick Email Address Book

If you use Personal Knowbase to keep track of contacts, try inserting each person's email addresses in the Attachments field to create a quick email address book.

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.

PK Tip: Printing a List of Articles

A recent tip talked about how to make a text list of selected article titles for using in another software application or putting into its own Personal Knowbase article.