Organize Your Information

Once you’ve gotten into the habit of collecting data in DEVONthink, you may quickly discover that you have hundreds or even thousands of pieces of information. Although you could, if you wanted, simply keep everything in your inbox and then search for whatever you need, DEVONthink offers numerous ways of grouping, labeling, tagging, and otherwise organizing your information. Once you’ve shown DEVONthink how you prefer to have your information organized, you can also take advantage of its almost magical Auto-Classify feature.

The better you organize your data in DEVONthink, the easier it is to find what you’re looking for and to see the connections between related items.

Understand Groups and Tags

Before I tell you how to group and tag documents, I want you to know a bit about how the two mechanisms operate.

Groups and tags are two ways of categorizing documents. Conceptually, they follow different models: you put documents in groups (so a document normally exists in only one location), whereas you apply tags to documents (so a document can have any number of tags). Of course, DEVONthink’s use of replicants makes it possible for a single document to exist in more than one location, but tags let you apply multiple categories to a document more simply and directly.

Groups tend to work best for data that has a largely self-evident logical structure, whereas tags are generally more freeform and subjective—how you want to think of particular documents rather than what data they objectively contain.

In order to enable groups and tags to work together as effectively as possible, DEVONthink uses the same underlying construct for both. That is to say, behind the scenes, both groups and tags are merely labels—pieces of metadata associated with documents. In many respects, groups and tags function (and even look) almost exactly the same, and you can mix and match groups and tags freely (but see the sidebar Stepping Stone: Are You a Grouper or a Tagger?, ahead).

However, there are some subtle differences in behavior between groups and tags, and they interact in sometimes surprising ways.

To reduce the likelihood of confusion, you should be aware of the following facts:

• Every tag is also a group—of sorts. All your tags are listed under Tags at the top level of your database (in what I’m calling the Tags list), and if you drag a document from outside DEVONthink to one of these tags (meaning it’s not already in an inbox or some other group), the only place that document appears in your database is in that tag’s “group.”
• Groups and tags can both be hierarchical—you can nest one inside another, as many levels deep as needed, just like folders in the Finder. You can drag and drop groups anywhere they appear in your database to rearrange them, but it may not be obvious how to rearrange tags. The easiest way to do so is to go to the Tags list at the top level of your database and drag one tag onto another, thus making the first tag a “child” of the second one.
• When you create a new database, groups do not function as tags by default, but you can enable them to if you like; then, having done so, you can then individually prevent particular groups from being used as tags, just as you could before.

  To enable group names to be used as tags, first right-click (Control-click) an open database name and choose Database Properties from the contextual menu. Then make sure Exclude Groups from Tagging is unchecked. This makes all groups eligible to be used as tags, as indicated by gold group icons with tags on them. To then prevent any particular group from being used as a tag, select that group and choose Tools > Show Info. In the Exclude From section, check Tagging. Groups that are excluded from tagging have blue icons.

• In the various locations in which DEVONthink shows tags (such as in the tag bar at the bottom of the window and Tag View), tags that come from group names appear in gray tokens, whereas tags you create manually—that is, ones not derived from groups—appear in blue tokens. (Tags that appear in the right-hand column in Tag View have a slightly different appearance but use the same color scheme: .)
• When groups function as tags, documents have tags not only for the group that contains them, but also for any groups higher in the structure. So, if a document is in the Cakes group, which is inside the Desserts group, which is inside the Recipes group, it gets Recipes, Desserts, and Cakes tags. Similarly, when tags are arranged hierarchically, any tagged document also inherits all the higher-level tags. So, if a document has a Cakes tag, which is under the Desserts tag in the Tags list, which in turn is under the Recipes tag, it once again gets Recipes, Desserts, and Cakes tags.
• Both regular tags and groups used as tags apply dynamically—if you change the hierarchy of groups or of the tags in your Tags list, all documents in those groups, or marked with those tags, update themselves to reflect the current arrangement.
• When you assign a (non-group) tag to a document that is already in at least one group or has at least one other tag, DEVONthink creates a replicant of that document under the corresponding tag in the Tags list. However, this replicant isn’t marked as a replicant (that is, it doesn’t have the icon or red color normally associated with replicants).
• You can have more than one group or tag with exactly the same name, because DEVONthink places no restrictions on how many times you can reuse a group or tag name (you can even have several identically named groups or tags within the same parent group or tag). So not only might you have a group and a tag with the same name, you could have more than one of each!

If you’ve enabled groups to be used as tags, additional curiosities arise:

• If a document is in a group, ipso facto, it’s tagged with that group’s name. If you remove the group’s tag from the document, the document disappears from that group (and, if that was the document’s only tag, DEVONthink moves it to the Trash). On the other hand, if a document has one or more tags but isn’t in any groups, the only place you’ll find it in your database is under the relevant tag(s) in the top-level Tags list.
• If you replicate a document to another group, not only the new replicant, but all replicants get the tag of the new group name (and its parent groups). So, if a document is in the Cookies group and you replicate it to the Sweets group, both replicants will be tagged with both group names.

If all that leaves your head spinning, don’t worry. It is a lot to keep straight, but my advice is to spend some time playing with groups and tags (following the instructions in the next couple of topics) and see for yourself how they work. If you get stuck or find that something isn’t working the way you expect, refer back to the preceding list, which may help you make sense of what you’re seeing.

Create and Use Groups

Creating groups is as easy as creating folders in the Finder (and in some cases, easier). DEVONthink gives you lots of ways to get documents into groups, including moving, duplicating, replicating, and using the groovy Auto Classify feature.

Create a Group

You can make a group in the current location in your DEVONthink database in any of the following ways:

• Choose Data > New > Group (Command-Shift-N).
• Click the Group button on the toolbar.
• From the Actions pop-up menu on the toolbar, choose New > Group.
• Right-click (or Control-click) anywhere a group or document may appear and choose New > Group.

After creating a new group (in any of these ways), type a name for it and press Return; you can select it and click its name later to rename it. The names of empty groups are shown in gray; when a group contains one or more items, the name is shown in black.

DEVONthink places no restrictions on how many groups you can create, how deeply you can nest them, or what you can name them (you can even have multiple identically named groups in the same location if you like, which strikes me as problematic). However, I tend to get the best results—especially when using features that rely on artificial intelligence—with a modest number of groups in a database (say, fewer than a hundred or so), nested only a few layers deep, and with more than a few documents in each one.

Use Auto Group

If you have lots of documents that you want to sort into groups, you could create the groups manually, examine the documents one by one, and figure out where each one belongs. However, DEVONthink has a nifty shortcut, based on its artificial intelligence capabilities: Auto Group. This feature is great for quickly grouping large numbers of freshly scanned, imported, or indexed documents.

It works like this. You select a bunch of documents in a given location and choose Data > Auto Group Items. DEVONthink attempts to create one or more new groups automatically based on the items’ shared characteristics, and sort the selected documents into those groups. (Like the regular Group command, Auto Group leaves the new groups in the same location, even if it’s your inbox.)

For example, if you selected ten documents, of which three were recipes, five were technical manuals, and two were scanned receipts, the Auto Group command would most likely create three groups and sort the documents into those categories automatically. Note, however, that Auto Group sometimes makes infelicitous grouping choices, and sometimes creates no groups at all (or leaves out documents that would seem to be obvious matches). In addition, it always names each group after one of its constituent documents, so you’ll likely want to rename them later.

Move Documents

You can freely reorganize your documents whenever you wish. The fundamental way to do so is to manually move them between locations. To move one or more selected items, do any of the following:

• Drag the item(s) to another group.
• From the Actions pop-up menu on the toolbar, choose Move To > Name of Group.
• Right-click (or Control-click) the document, and choose Move To > Name of Group.

Classify and Auto Classify Documents

If you’re not sure where a document belongs—or if you have a pretty good idea but want to save yourself the effort of navigating to that location—you can use either of two related features (Classify and Auto Classify) to help you choose a home for each piece of data.

Classify

The Classify feature examines the contents of a document and, by comparing them to the contents of other documents in your database, recommends one or more locations in which to store it.

To use Classify, select a single document and choose Data > See Also & Classify (or click the See Also & Classify button on the navigation bar, if visible). The See Also & Classify drawer appears at the right. For now, pay attention to the top of the drawer—the Classify portion (Figure 46).

The groups listed here are the ones DEVONthink deems to have contents most similar to the document you’ve selected; the Score column has a bar that indicates the approximate level of relevance for each group. The topmost group (that is, the one with the highest score) is selected by default. To move the document into this group, click Move To (or press Control-C). If you think a different group is a better match, select it and then click Move To. And, if you think the document belongs in more than one group, Command-click to select more than one and click Move To; DEVONthink puts a replicant of the document in each one.

Auto Classify

If, after using the Classify feature for a while, you realize that you nearly always accept DEVONthink’s default choice, you can skip a step or two and have DEVONthink move a document—or more than one document—right into the highest-scoring group. That’s Auto Classify.

To use Auto Classify, select one or more documents and then choose Data > Auto Classify, or choose Auto Classify from the Actions pop-up menu on the toolbar or the right-click/Control-click contextual menu. DEVONthink then examines each one and moves it to the location it deems best. (If it can’t find a suitable location, it leaves the document where it is and displays an error message in the Log panel.)

Duplicate and Replicate Documents

The usual way of classifying documents is to put them in a group (or apply a tag), but in some cases you may want to make an exact copy of a document (a duplicate) or a pointer that lets DEVONthink store just one copy, but display it in an additional location (a replicant).

Make a Duplicate

The most common reason to make a duplicate is that you want to modify a document but leave the original intact. (For example, you may want to use last year’s annual report as the basis for this year’s report, making additions and modifications as necessary.)

To duplicate a document, first select it and then do any of the following:

• Choose Data > Duplicate (Command-D) to make a duplicate in the same location.
• Hold down the Option key while dragging the document to another group.
• From the Actions pop-up menu on the toolbar, choose Duplicate To > Name of Group.
• Right-click (or Control-click) the document, and choose Duplicate To > Name of Group from the contextual menu.

Make a Replicant

Replicants let you store a single document in several different places in your database without taking up extra disk space. (You cannot replicate a document across databases.) Because all replicants are pointers to the same underlying file, changes you make to any replicant are reflected in all of them. Replicants make sense for documents that don’t belong in just one group, but fit well into several.

For example, if you have an ebook copy of The Hunchback of Notre Dame in your database, that might belong in your Paris group, your Fiction group, or your History group. With replicants, it can be in all three at the same time, and any annotations you make in any location are visible in the others too.

To replicate a document, first select it and then do any of the following:

• Choose Data > Replicate (Command-L) to make a replicant in the same location.
• Hold down the Command and Option keys while dragging the document to another group.
• From the Actions pop-up menu on the toolbar, choose Replicate To > Name of Group.
• Right-click (or Control-click) the document, and choose Replicate To > Name of Group from the contextual menu.

For all practical purposes, having a replicant of a document in three groups is equivalent to having a single document with three tags applied. You may need to experiment with both approaches to see whether one or the other (or a combination) works best for you.

Tag Documents

Tags function almost, but not quite, like groups (and in some cases groups and tags are interchangeable). Tags let you apply categories to documents without moving them to another location, and a given document can have as many tags as you need.

Any tags you’ve applied in the Finder stay with the document or folder when you import it to DEVONthink; likewise, any tags you apply in DEVONthink turn into Finder tags when you export a document or group (or drag it from DEVONthink to the Finder). DEVONthink also recognizes tags applied to email messages using the MailTags plugin.

The remainder of this topic discusses tagging within DEVONthink.

Use the Tag Bar

Although it’s possible to create tags by themselves (select a tag in the Tags list and choose Data > New > Tag), that’s a rather odd thing to do; normally you’ll create a tag by applying it to a document. The standard way to do so is this:

1. Select a document.
2. Make sure the tag bar is visible at the bottom of the window. If not, choose View > Show Tags (Command-Control-Option-T).
3. To make a new tag and apply it to the current document, click in the tag bar and start typing.
4. When you’re finished typing the name you want the tag to have, press Tab.

The new tag appears in a blue rectangle, known as a token. You can repeat this process for as many tags as you want the document to have.

Use Autocompletion

Once you’ve created some tags, DEVONthink uses autocompletion to help you apply them. That is, as you’re typing a tag name, DEVONthink looks for matches in existing tag names and if it finds any, it displays them in a pop-up menu. To accept one of these suggestions, select it (using the arrow keys or the mouse) and press Return; if none of them is what you want, simply keep typing normally.

Use Pop-up Tag Menus

You may notice that each tag in the tag bar has a small triangle, indicating that it’s also a pop-up menu. Click the triangle to reveal the following commands:

• Reveal Tag: Choose Reveal Tags to switch the window to show the Tags list (see Use the Tags List, ahead shortly) and highlight the selected tag.
• Remove Tag: This command removes the tag from (only) the selected document.

• Related Tags: Any additional tags that DEVONthink’s artificial intelligence judges as potentially applicable to this document appear under Related Tags. (Tags that are dimmed are related, but already applied to the document.) To add one of these tags, select its name.

Work with Group Tags

If you enable groups to be used as tags (see Understand Groups and Tags), the tag bar shows not only blue stand-alone tags but also gray tags representing the name of the group containing the document (if any—this doesn’t apply to documents in an inbox or at the top level of your database), and all its parent groups.

You can work with these tags in much the same way as with normal tags. Use the pop-up menu to reveal the group in the current view, to remove the current group tag, or to apply related tags. (If you remove a group tag, DEVONthink moves the document out of the selected group; if you remove all the group tags, the document moves to the top level of your database.)

Use the Tags List

The top level of each database has a Tags icon, which contains a list of all your (non-group) tags. Click any of these tags to display all the documents with that tag. You can do the following in the Tags list:

• Rename a tag: Click its name, press Return, and type a new name. The new name applies to all documents with that tag.
• Remove a tag: Once you’ve created a tag, it stays in your database, even if you’ve removed it from all your documents (or removed all documents that had that tag). To remove a tag from your database, select it in the Tags list and press Delete.
• Assign a tag to a document: If you drag a document to a tag in the Tags list, DEVONthink assigns that tag to the document.
• Move a tag: Tags can contain other tags, such that applying a “child” tag to a document also applies all its “parent” tags. In the Tags list, you can drag and drop tags just as you would do for groups to rearrange their hierarchical structure.

Work with Links and WikiLinks

Web pages contain clickable links to other Web pages (these links are often represented by blue, underlined text), and other kinds of documents—including email messages and PDF files—likewise can contain links to Web pages. DEVONthink documents, too, can contain links to Web pages, but they can also contain links to other items in your database, which is the sort of link I’m concerned with here.

Like Web page links, links to other DEVONthink documents appear in blue underline, and they let you navigate quickly to related content. (Clicking a link replaces the current view with the linked document—after prompting you to save, if necessary. To return to the previous document, click the Go Back button on the navigation bar. You can Command-click a link to open it in a separate tab.) A special kind of link called a WikiLink lets you link directly to a particular document by name, creating the document if it doesn’t already exist.

Create a Standard Link

You can create a link to another DEVONthink document in any of several ways:

• Start from the link’s source: Select some text in a rich text document, right-click (or Control-click) it, and choose Link to > Destination (that is, any group, tag, or document, in any open database) from the contextual menu. The text you selected becomes a clickable link to the destination you chose.
• Start from the link’s destination: Select a document in your database and choose Edit > Copy Item Link (Command-Control-Option-C) to put a link to that document on the Clipboard. Then place your insertion point in any rich text document and choose Edit > Paste (Command-V) to paste a link to the first document at that location.
• Drag and drop: Double-click a rich text document to open it in its own window. Then Command-Option-drag a document from elsewhere in your database and drop it at the spot where you want the link to appear. The link will appear as the linked file’s name.

Create a WikiLink

To create a link to another document by name—a WikiLink—type the other document’s exact name in a rich text document, select it, and choose Format > Make Link. (The Make Link command is also found on the right-click/Control-click contextual menu.) The text becomes blue and underlined, and clicking it opens the linked document.

If you select some text and choose Format > Make Link but there isn’t already a document with that exact name, DEVONthink creates that document (in the same location as the document you’re currently editing) when you first click the link, using a special template.

To adjust the text and variables used in this template, go to DEVONthink > Preferences > Editing (Figure 47) and make your desired changes in the Template field at the bottom of the window.

If you use WikiLinks often, you can have DEVONthink create them as you work in a much more automatic manner. In DEVONthink > Preferences > Editing, check the Automatic box next to WikiLinks to turn on this feature. Then select one of the following radio buttons:

• Names and Aliases: With this (default) setting, DEVONthink creates a link to any document in your database as soon as you type its full and exact name. DEVONthink also creates links automatically to any string of text that you’ve defined as an alias for a document. (To create an alias, which in DEVONthink is simply an alternative name, select a document and choose Tools > Show Info. Type one or more aliases, separated by commas, in the Aliases field.) However, with this setting, DEVONthink never creates links to nonexistent documents.
• MashedWords and Aliases: DEVONthink creates links automatically only when you type a string with no spaces and a capital letter in the middle (sometimes called CamelCase or an InterCap). For example, type AppleScript and that word becomes a WikiLink to a (new or existing) document named AppleScript.

You can also adjust DEVONthink’s behavior when you click a WikiLink. If Open New Documents in Separate Windows is checked (the default), DEVONthink opens a new window the first time you click a WikiLink for a document that didn’t previously exist. Uncheck this box, and the new document opens in the current view, replacing the existing document.

Move Data between Databases

Just as you can drag documents or groups from one group to another, you can drag items from one database to another. (And note: this really does move items, deleting them from one database and adding them to the other, although you can also copy items if you prefer, as I describe ahead.) However, there’s a minor catch: regardless of which view you use, DEVONthink shows you the contents of only one database at a time. If the sidebar is visible, you can see your list of open databases, which is a step in the right direction, but you can see the groups only within the one that’s currently selected. So it may not be obvious how to move something from one database to a specific location in another.

To move one or more selected items to another database, do any of the following:

• With the sidebar visible (View > Show Sidebar), drag the item(s) to the other database. This moves them from the current database to the other database’s inbox.
• Display the Groups & Tags panel (Tools > Show Groups & Tags) and drag the item(s) to the desired location in that panel.
• Assuming you have enough room on your screen, open a new window for the second database (choose File > New Window > Name of Other Database) and then drag the item(s) from one window into the desired location in the other.

• Choose Move To > Destination in Other Database from the Actions pop-up menu on the toolbar or the Control-click contextual menu. (To copy rather than move, use the Duplicate To submenu instead.)

Split and Merge Documents

From time to time you may encounter a document divided into sections that cover different topics—say, an academic paper or a long ebook—and realize that the data would serve you better if it were stored in DEVONthink as multiple documents, each containing part of the data. The reverse may also be true: you may have a bunch of snippets or fragments that make more sense in a single document. If either case applies to you, you can use DEVONthink commands to quickly split or merge documents.

Split a Document

To split a document, put the insertion point at the location where you want to divide the document in two and choose Edit > Split Document. DEVONthink instantly creates two documents—one with the original name that contains the material before the insertion point, and another with the original name plus 2 and the material after the insertion point.

Merge Documents

To merge two or more documents, select them and then choose Data > Merge, or use the Merge command on the Actions pop-up menu on the toolbar or the Control-click contextual menu. DEVONthink creates a new document containing the contents of all the selected documents (and a name such as “5 merged documents”) but does not delete the originals.

You can create a merged document from almost any type of file (including graphics, plain and rich text, PDF, sheets, and Web pages). DEVONthink saves the resulting document as a PDF if the constituent documents were only PDFs, PostScript files, and/or images. If any of the merged documents was of a different type, the result is a rich text document.