If there’s one telling thing that marks the information age it’s that we simply have too much information. Any Mac or PC user knows the problem.
The digital deluge of information that flows across our screens each day comes with management overhead. Email, URLs, usernames and login IDs, passwords, financial numbers, notes, to-do lists, and snippets. How can we keep track of it all, save it, manage it?
Storing And Tracking The Untrackable
Between you and me, I don’t think this is a war we can win without some professional help. Personal information management tools are a dime a dozen. Finding a PIM that holds everything, organizes it all the way you want, and makes it easy to retrieve what you need when you want it? That’s a major challenge.
Enter Dossier and 5 ways it makes managing informational stuff easier.
Dossier is obscurely yet appropriately named. It’s not a catchy name, evoking James Bond and some kind of intelligence briefing document. Yet, a dossier usually contains gathered intelligence information. Close enough.
When it comes to gathering, storing, tracking, and retrieving personal information (the aforementioned notes, URLs, snippets, to-do lists, usernames, IDs, passwords, credit card or financial information), Dossier does it five ways you want, and one you probably don’t.
5 Ways To Make Information Management Fun
Alright, fun probably isn’t the right word. Painful? Nah, that doesn’t fit, either, because Dossier does what you need. How about painless? I found just the features you need, and one you don’t.
First, Dossier grabs and stores almost anything you need in a straightforward, not-to-cluttered interface.
#1 – Photos or images can be dropped into notes or documents via drag and drop. Each item can be created and saved with a click.
#2 - All those pieces of information you gather and save can be stored in Smart Folders, which can organized however you prefer, included folders nested in folders.
#3 – Each snippet of information can be viewed in a list within a folder, or individually by popping open the document window. Each document has basic tools—print or save, change font or size, add a ruler, even toolbar customization.
#4 – Searching is a breeze and very fast. Search results can be saved as Smart Folders.
Dossier also provides complete Spotlight search capability; handy after you’ve collected a few thousand pieces of information. It’s fast, efficient, and easy to organize all the snippets of information you gather and track each day.
#5 – Whatever information—the stuff you gather—that’s dropped into Dossier is encrypted. Information can be imported and exported in various text formats. Rich text printing capability is built in, too.
Thinking Different
Dossier looks and acts familiar and takes only minutes to figure out how to use it and why. Strangely, Dossier also comes with blogging support built in.
Blogging support?
Sure, you have a blog, right?
Dossier supports Atom, Blogger, and Live Journal so you can use the app as a note-taking vacuum cleaner that stores whatever you’re thinking and makes it easy to upload to your blog.
That means you won’t need to leave the app you use to gather and store snippets of information that you may use on your blog, while you blog about what information you’ve gathered.
That’s not exactly a must-have feature, but it’s thinking different. Dossier is modestly priced, instantly familiar and easy to use, totally customizable via nested folders. If you have plenty of snippets of information which float across your Mac’s screen all day, the Dossier is worth the two minutes it takes to learn.
About Jeffrey Mincey
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