Tutorial: Copying Info from Other Applications

It's common to bring information into Personal Knowbase from other Windows programs, either by copying or importing the data. Let's copy some information from the Internet:

•	Open your Internet browser application.

Or, if you prefer, open a file in your word processor or another program that uses text.

•	Go to your favorite news web site or any web site which uses a lot of text.

If you can't think of a web site you want to visit, come to Bitsmith Software's site by entering "www.bitsmithsoft.com" as the Address or Location.

•	Select a news article or a few paragraphs of text from the browser window.

To select the text, simply drag your mouse cursor across the text you want.

•	Copy the text to the Windows clipboard by pressing Ctrl-C.

Now put the text into your data file:

•	Back in Personal Knowbase, make sure that you have opened the data file GENERAL.KNO which we created in the previous step of the tutorial.

If GENERAL.KNO is not open, use the File menu to open the file. The four most recently opened files are listed at the bottom of the File menu. Simply click on "GENERAL.KNO" to open it.

•	To create a new empty article, click on the New Article button on the Toolbar.

•	Type any title into the title box.

You might call the article "Latest Internet News". Press Enter to finish the title. Notice that the cursor automatically moves to the article content area when you press Enter.

•	Press Ctrl-V to paste the information that you copied to the clipboard.

The text that you copied from your browser window is now the text of the new article.

Create a couple keywords so you can find this article again later:

•	Double-click on the Keywords list box on the right side of the window.

The Keywords for Article dialog box is displayed.

•	In the New Keyword edit box, type "web" and press the Enter key.

The keyword Web, which you created for this data file in the previous step of the tutorial, is added to the list of keywords assigned to this article. You might find a keyword like Web useful to indicate the source of the data in an article.

•	Click on the OK button to exit the dialog box.

We return to the Article Window. The keyword Web has been added to the keyword list on the right side of the window.

•	Find a word within the article text which would make a good keyword.

For example, if you copied some information from Bitsmith Software's web site, you might select the word "software". For a news article, you might use a keyword which reflects the topic's subject.

•	Select the word in the article content area.

To select a single word, double-click on it. To select a phrase, drag the mouse cursor across the text to highlight it.

•	From the Keyword menu, select the Create Keyword command.

The selected text is added to the keyword list for this article.

•	Click on the window's close box to close and save the article.

Now let's import a simple text file:

•	From the File menu, select the Import command.

The Import dialog box is displayed.

•	Make sure that Files of Type is set to "Text Files (*.txt)".

All files in the current folder with the extension TXT are listed.

•	Using the Look in drop-down menu, navigate to the Personal Knowbase data folder under your "My Documents" folder.

A file called SAMPLE.TXT should be found here, which is distributed with Personal Knowbase.

•	Choose this or another text file and double-click on its file name.

The Keywords for Imported Articles dialog box is displayed. This window is for assigning keywords to the article that you are creating from this text file.

•	In the New Keyword edit box, type a keyword for this article and press the Enter key.

For example, if you want to be able to find all imported articles later, you might add the keyword "imported text file". The keyword is added to the list of keywords assigned to this article. You can assign an existing keyword to the imported article by double-clicking on a keyword in the Available Keywords column.

•	Click on the OK button to exit the dialog box.

The Article Window for the imported article is displayed. The text from the file is the article content. The file's name is shown in the title box. You can edit the title to something more descriptive if you want.

•	Click on the window's close box to close and save the article.

Back in the Index Window, the titles of your new articles appear in the Titles column.

Proceed to the next step in the tutorial to learn more about the Index Window.