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Bitsmith Software All Deals Productivity Software PIM Software

Personal Knowbase

Your Important Info Deserves Keywords

$49.95

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Platforms: Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, 10

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There are a number of problems with keeping important information on paper notes -- when you need to find something fast, you're forced to flip through each note sequentially, even if you have your notes categorized! Perhaps it's time to take a hint from the way that the internet works and start keeping track of your info using keywords!

Personal Knowbase is a freeform note organizer that focuses on the use of keywords for quick access to your information. Whether you want to organize research notes, email messages, tickler files, or all of the above, Personal Knowbase will make your life easier and your time more productive!

Right off the bat, you'll appreciate Personal Knowbase's clean and intuitive interface. There's no limit on the number or size of your notes, so those of you with a lot of information to manage will be able to take full advantage of the program. Just choose keywords to associate with each piece of your info, and Personal Knowbase will index all of it for quick access whenever you need it.

If you're worried about security, Personal Knowbase lets you protect your information with a password. And if you aren't sure when and where you'll need to access your Personal Knowbase items, you'll be pleased to know that it can all fit on a USB flash drive, right in your pocket! You can even share your notes with people who don't have Personal Knowbase, thanks to the free Personal Knowbase Reader! It's perfect for companies, perfect for teachers, perfect for help centers, and perfect for you.

Review Written by Derek Lee

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Testimonials

Review what others have to say...
“I love this software. I am an information junkie and for 25 years I have been trying software systems of information management to achieve the results I want. I have looked at all the PIMS and info management programs out there...I am profoundly impressed with the thoughtfulness of your design, the robustness of the software and the ease of use - not to mention its incredible power.Even putting all my information into your product has been made easy by your very adaptable import function - just brilliant. Plus I have info all over the place and in several would-be information manager-type progs; it is all going into your program.People talk about software that is a must have and "how could I have lived without it"; that is what your software is to me. You get 6 out of 5 stars for me...”- Peter Kelly
“This software was a dream come true for me. I'm a writer who is constantly working on multiple projects and designed in my head what the perfect software for organising my notes would be, and lo and behold, you'd already created it!”- Stuart van Eysden
“I've been using Knowbase for about six months now, and I realized today that it's passed my ultimate software test: I use it every day, and I don't even notice it anymore. It's like having a second brain to keep stuff in. I'm a grad student, and I don't know how I functioned before I had this thing. It should be handed out to all college students in their orientation packets.”- Kimberly Stedman
“I'm a filmmaker and new media developer and I'm at the very beginning of understanding and using Personal Knowbase to support my work. However even at this early stage I can see it is going to be extremely valuable. I'm in the process of transferring years of research from word processing files containing data into organized Personal Knowbase files containing information. Going from endless scrolling text files to keyword searching is a quantum leap in access. I'm finding relationships in my files I was never aware of before using Personal Knowbase. I'm sure every Knowledge worker and media developer can make good use of this easy to use but deep app.”- Roger Wyatt
“I've used your product for several years. I find new uses for it every day. I can't imagine my job without it. It's simply one program I can't do without.”- Andy Hines

Expand All Email Updates Load 6 Older Comments

Kelly Hamblin I found this question and answer, dated sometime in 2006, on the Personal Knowbase forum:

Question: Can I search for text across multiple Knowbase files?
Answer: No, there is currently no easy way to search for a text string in several data files at once.

That's a killer. Does the answer still stand in 2015?

Sep 20 2015 at 9:08am Copy Link

Laura Look Hi Kelly,

Yes, this answer still stands.

A single Knowbase data file can contain any number of notes. So, if you store thousands of notes in one data file, you can search across all of those notes at once. Many users only ever have a single data file. It's only if you create multiple files, for example to separate work and personal notes, that it becomes an issue that you must search each data file separately.

Bitsmith Software - Sep 20 2015 at 10:06am Copy Link

Kelly Hamblin Thanks for answering. :)

Sep 20 2015 at 3:07pm Copy Link

Felix Adams Each license allows installation on all owned computers, but Personal Knowbase may not be used at exactly the same time on each of them.
[ OK ]
Transfer of a license to another owned computer is not allowed.
[ ??? ]

Sep 20 2015 at 9:35pm Copy Link

Laura Look Hi Felix,

Thanks for pointing that out. I think I've fixed it now. It should say that you can't transfer to another *person*.

That concurrent thing wasn't right either. That doesn't make any sense for a single-user license. We don't have a problem with you using it on 2 computers at once if you have 2 computers set up side by side and can type on each keyboard with a different hand.

BDJ makes the license options more convoluted than they have to be.

It's simply a single-user license. One license, one person.

Bitsmith Software - Sep 20 2015 at 10:08pm Copy Link

_*_ Maybe I am missing something here, so I wanted to write.

I have downloaded the demo and find the way to enter "Articles" is through copy and paste to be effective.
I have tried to drag and drop some Word .docx files onto the program but it simply displays gibberish.
I have tried to make an Article have a reminder, but you have to create the article first, then reopen it and add a reminder. Tedious and time consuming.

Is this program all about copy and paste to get things into it?

Is there a faster, simpler way to add websites, documents, tables, etc. into the software?

Thanks

Sep 21 2015 at 4:46pm Copy Link

Laura Look Hi "_*_",

The usual way to enter information into Personal Knowbase is to type it into the content area of the Article Window.

Copy-and-paste also works. Usually, you can drag a selected block of text from another application into an open Article Window (whether dragging works depends on the source program as some programs don't support dragging text out of them).

You can also import several files types, including text, RTF, Cardfile, HTML, and text-based delimited/CSV files.

Importing Word files is not supported automatically. There is a free import plug-in available for importing doc/docx files. Without the plug-in installed, PK would not have recognized the docx format, so it probably tried to import it as text.

Thanks for the input on the Reminder feature. That feature was recently added, so we are looking for ways to improve it.

Bitsmith Software - Sep 21 2015 at 8:02pm Copy Link

Harald User Hi,

I use the Demo Version at the moment and have a few questions:

When adding more than one attachements and clicking on the icon it opens all added attachements at once. Is there a way to change this (maybe showing a list when more than one attachements are present) to choose an attachement?

I would like to add several attachments (corresponding pdf files and folders) to an article but when I can't choose between attachments and all are always openend this would be quite useless for me.

Also is there a way to change the file explorer (I prefer TotalCommander) for opening attachements / folder hyperlinks.

The Database looks very promising but how dealing with attachments would be very important for me.

Thanks.

Sep 22 2015 at 1:58am Copy Link

_*_ @Laura Look, thank you for explaining.

Since the main way it to type your own information into the program, it leads me to two other questions.

1. what is the way people are expected to move into PK all their existing files, tables, documents, PDF's, etc?

2. Why doesn't PK look and act like a word processor with direct compatibility for opening and adding in files?
Also, a word processor interface (within Articles) would afford greater control in typing in new information.

Thanks again.

Sep 22 2015 at 4:43am Copy Link

Sputnik @ _*_

I think that moving all of our different documents inside PK is just a part of the problem.

It seems that after that moving in you will have to go through every and all of your different imported documents to decide for each of them what are the keywords of each document.

This operation seems to be mandatory for a good operation of the program because it is the only way PK may retrieve any document related to a very specific keyword or set of keywords.

PK may be a good software, but it takes what it takes to make it work the way it is supposed to work...

Sep 22 2015 at 6:39am Copy Link

Laura Look Hi Harald, > When adding more than one attachements and clicking on the icon it opens all added attachements at once < Yes, clicking the icon opens all of an article's attachments at once. You can open a single attachment from the Attachments tab of the Article Properties dialog box and selecting your attachment from there. If you're using attachments a lot, I recommend turning on the Tools Toolbar (from the View menu). That toolbar includes an "Attachments" button that takes you directly to the list of attachments for the current article. > Also is there a way to change the file explorer < No, all folder attachments / hypertext links are opened in Windows Explorer. Thanks for the feedback.

Bitsmith Software - Sep 22 2015 at 9:52am Copy Link

Laura Look Hi "_*_", > what is the way people are expected to move into PK all their existing files, tables, documents, PDF's, etc? < (1) Personal Knowbase is a text-based program intended for storing text notes. People are not expected to move all their documents into PK. By using article attachments, you can link all your documents to PK articles so that you can access your non-text information from external files (such as PDFs and spreadsheets) with the same set of keywords. You can also create hypertext links to external files. > Why doesn't PK look and act like a word processor < (2) PK does not act like a word processor because it is not a word processor. It is a note repository. We have strived to avoid feature bloat with PK. If you need a full-featured word processor, PK is probably not appropriate for you.

Bitsmith Software - Sep 22 2015 at 10:04am Copy Link

Laura Look I apologize for the lack of formatting in my responses.

I am pasting my responses in with lots of carriage returns, but BDJ is stripping the carriage returns out. I can't find a way to delete or edit the text after hitting Post.

Bitsmith Software - Sep 22 2015 at 10:08am Copy Link

Laura Look Hi Sputnik,

Yes, this is the way Personal Knowbase works. Thanks for your feedback.

Bitsmith Software - Sep 22 2015 at 10:12am Copy Link

Harald User Hi Laura,

great! Thank you for your help.

Sep 22 2015 at 3:40pm Copy Link

No Name Thanks Laura, for being so responsive and so clear in your responses!

I have a query that's a little bit less simple. I currently use Evernote for this. I've tried MyInfo and RightNote, but I find that the availability of the cloud is just too much of a killer feature, and the others didn't have anything over that feature to make it worthwhile to switch.

What killer feature does this have that Evernote doesn't that might counterbalance that?

Sep 23 2015 at 5:59am Copy Link

_*_ @Laura Look,

I am still demo-ing the software and would like to know if there is a way to clear a Search, so the software displays (in the upper right window) the entire list again.

Thanks

Sep 23 2015 at 7:48am Copy Link

Laura Look Hi wraith,

[ the availability of the cloud is just too much of a killer feature ... What killer feature does this have that Evernote doesn't that might counterbalance that? ]

Privacy.

It depends on what type of notes you're storing and whether you trust hackers to leave your data alone. Every cloud-based system will be hacked. If you're not storing anything personal or private, the cloud is probably ok.

Personal Knowbase stores data locally on the users' own computers or networks, where they have control of their own data. Access is more convenient on local computers, with no need to log in or to worry about data's privacy and safety. Unlike with cloud-based solutions, data is not subject to unavailability due to outages or data loss due to discontinued services.

Bitsmith Software - Sep 23 2015 at 8:19am Copy Link

Laura Look Hi _*_,

[ if there is a way to clear a Search, so the software displays (in the upper right window) the entire list again ]

To get the entire article list back, use the "Show All Articles" command from the Article menu. There is an equivalent toolbar button, the one that looks like 3 little cascading yellow notes.

Once this gets to be too long a list, you may prefer to just show the bookmarked articles list using the "Show Bookmarked Articles" command or its equivalent toolbar button.

Bitsmith Software - Sep 23 2015 at 8:28am Copy Link

No Name @Laura - Thanks for the quick and concise reply!

Sep 23 2015 at 9:05am Copy Link

_*_ @Laura Look, Purchased, as I really like the tagging system, and your answer above about Privacy and data stored locally, sealed the deal for me.
I am not a cloud user and never intend to be, so thank you for making an alternative.

I would love to see videos showing how to work the finer details of the program.

Thanks

Sep 23 2015 at 9:09am Copy Link

Laura Look Hi _*_,

Thanks for your order. And thank you for the feedback.

Bitsmith Software - Sep 23 2015 at 9:29am Copy Link

Petr These days, I need my personal info on several of my devices: home computer, laptop, android phone, iPad. Therefore my questions:

#1. Does your software have a sync feature to make all data consistent between installatsions?

#2. Do you have versions that run on my mobile devices?

Thank you.
P.

Sep 23 2015 at 9:36am Copy Link

Laura Look Hi Petr,

Sorry, no, we do not currently have a mobile version of Personal Knowbase for Android or iPad. PK is only available for the Windows desktop platform.

There is no built-in way to synchronize Knowbase data files between two computers. The only way to move the data back and forth between 2 copies of the software is to copy the actual data file using Windows.

Bitsmith Software - Sep 23 2015 at 9:48am Copy Link

No Name @Laura - Is it possible to automate that sync? What considerations would need to be taken into account? The two scenarios I'm thinking:

1. Put the file directly into the dropbox, onedrive, etc folder, so that you're opening the file from that location.
2. Make a script that copies on a time based schedule (either to dropbox location or another location accessible by both copies)
3. Make a script that copies when you exit the program (either to dropbox location or another location accessible by both copies)

Thoughts?

Sep 23 2015 at 10:16am Copy Link

Laura Look Hi wraith,

I'm not sure. Third-party synch or script programs should work fine with Personal Knowbase files. Each Personal Knowbase data file is a single self-contained file, ending with the extension type .KNO. You should be able to copy/synch just that file to the central location.

(Exception: If you use article attachments to external files, those external files would also have to be synched if you need them from the 2nd computer. However, the KNO file is still completely usable with the file attachments missing, if you only need to access the file attachments from one computer.)

We have customers who have mentioned using DropBox for access, apparently successfully, but I don't have personal experience with that.

If there's a way to make Windows see the "central location" as a network drive, that should work. Personal Knowbase works fine across a network (although only one user can access the data file at a time).

Bitsmith Software - Sep 23 2015 at 10:53am Copy Link