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Latest on Mon, 01:14 pm: I don't see any way to print, Edit/print as pdf is greyed out
: @dean, Definitely! Please search for "Dropbox" in this website. Ryo
: Is there a way to keep two computers in sync without import/export?
: Any way to import data from Things or Yojimbo? Thanks!
: Out of sheer curiosity: what technology / framework are you using to develop Pagico?
Managing Contacts
- Video Tutorial: Contact Management
- Contact Profiles
- Creating a new contact profile
- Entering Contact Info
- Activities
- Setting up tasks regarding to a specific contact profile
- Import contacts from Address Book
- Video Tutorial: Interlink Everything
- Click-and-link
- Collections
- Moving things among topics and profiles
- Inline-Linking to topics or contact profiles
- Inserting files into Contact Profiles
- Inserting Email messages
- Associate Topics with Contact Profiles
- Export / Print a contact profile as PDF files
- Data Detector
- Smart Grouping: Organize Contacts in Groups, automatically
Contact Profiles
A contact profile is like a history about a person: You can keep track of every important information about this person (or organization) in his profile, such as contact information, follow-up tasks, communication records, meeting notes, and file attachments, etc. And even more, everything is organized in the order of time. So whenever you want to review your relationship with a person, this is the place to do it.
Creating a new contact profile
To create a new contact profile, simply click the “People” section in the sidebar, then write the person’s name (or organization name) in the “Add a new contact” input textbox, and hit “enter” to create the profile.
Entering Contact Info
Need to take down some contact information for the contact profile? Just write in the contact info box.
The fun part is Pagico doesn’t restrict you on what you type. It’s not like ordinary address book application which only provides you with limited categories to write. Instead, write whatever you want. After entering the info, just hit “enter” to save it.
For example, “tel:123-4567″, or “position: sales”, or even “favorite food:pasta”.
But Pagico doesn’t only save the information in the database, but also providing you with great classification feature based on the information. Learn more about the Auto-Grouping feature.
Tips & Hints
The information you entered before will be displayed as buttons right under the input box for your quick choice — you can still write new ones, or use old ones by clicking on one of them.
Activities
A sample conversation note
Activities can be considered as “notes” about a person. You can take meeting notes and save that as an activity with a date of the meeting, or take notes about a conversation over phone call, etc. Basically you write down whatever information you think you might need in the future.
Please note that activities are not “tasks”. So even if you set an activity with a date in the future, it will not be listed in your schedule flowchart, nor will it be listed in the upcoming tasks section in the sidebar. If you need to set up a follow-up task, please click here.
Activities can be attached with file attachments. So email messages, PDF faxes or Word documents that you received from the person, can be saved with the activity.
Setting up tasks regarding to a specific contact profile
Creating follow-up tasks for specific contacts is very easy in Pagico. Just open up the contact profile (create one if you need), and type in the task name and due date.
After typing in the information, just hit “enter” to save it as a task.
Tasks in contact profiles doesn’t have to have a due date. But only tasks with a due date will be listed in the schedule flowchart, as well as in the "upcoming tasks" section in the sidebar.
Import contacts from Address Book
Pagico accepts vCard files, which is an industry standard file format for contact information. For mac users, you can get vCard files for certain contacts by dragging them from your Address Book to your desktop.
To import vCard files as contacts, simply navigate to the “People” section by clicking it in the sidebar, then drag and drop the vCard files into the Pagico window.
Once imported, you’ll be able to see those contacts in the contacts list.
Tips & Hints
Make sure you’re in the contact list before dragging in the vCard files. If you’re in a topic, then the vCard file will be added as a file attachment.
If you’re in a contact profile, Pagico will replace the contact information in the current profile with the vCard file you just dragged in.
A vCard file can contain multiple person’s contact information. So when you’re dragging out a group of people from the Address Book, you may only see one vCard file generated on your desktop.
Click-and-link
Note
The feature described in this article is only available in Pagico v4.
In many cases, you will want to expand a certain concept (task or person’s name, etc) into a topic by creating a same-name topic (or contact profile) and link to it. Thankfully, in Pagico v4, this action can be really easy. Take a look at this screencast. Read More
Collections
Note
The feature described in this article requires Pagico v4.0 and higher.
Collections are just like folders, and they can contain topics and contact profiles.
Creating a collection
To create a new collection, simply click on the plus (”+”) button in the lower left corner, then click on the “New Collection” menu item. All the collections are displayed in the “Collections” group in the sidebar.
Editing a collection
To edit (the content of) a collection, please first open that collection by clicking it in the sidebar, and click anywhere near the title of the collection to see the settings panel.
There are two types of collections: static and smart. You can set this up in the settings panel of a collection.
Static Collection
Static collections are just like regular folders, and you can add content to it manually by dragging items from the right list to the left list. You can also re-order the items in the left list, which is the content of the selected collection.
Smart Collection
Smart collections are just like the smart playlists in music players. You can set one or more rules, based on which the content of the collection will be picked automatically.
Live Update?
By default the “Live Update” checkbox is not checked. And this means that Pagico will pick everything based on your criteria, and then switch this collection back into a regular, static collection. Then you can modify and re-order the content manually.
Once it’s checked, the selected collection will always stay as a smart collection, and its content will be updated automatically based on your criteria.
Deleting a collection
To delete a collection, you need to first open the collection, and click the trash icon located in the right upper corner of the collection title area. Deleting a collection does not remove its content. That means topics and profiles within the collection are not deleted when a collection is removed. Also, deleted collections do not show up in the trash bin.
Moving things among topics and profiles
The Topic / Profile selector panel, a newly introduced feature in Pagico v3.3, allows users to move stuff around, among topics and contact profiles (restrictions apply, see below).
Copying text, lists and files among topics
To do so, simply hover on the segment you’d like to duplicate, then click on the “Insert” icon to see the topic / profile selector panel. Then check all the desired destinations (you can copy to multiple topics at once!), and click “Confirm” button to start the duplicate process.
Also, you can type in the “Search” text box to filter the result list as you type.
Copying text and files from topics to profiles (and vice versa)
You can copy text and files from topics to profiles and vice versa by following the same procedure as above. One thing to note is that lists in topics could not be copied and inserted into profiles, while tasks in profiles could not be copied and inserted into topics.
Important notes
- This feature requires Pagico v3.3 or later.
- Items are duplicated, instead of linked from or moved to the destination(s).
Inline-Linking to topics or contact profiles
Pagico provides very powerful and flexible linking features, not just the links in the foot notes section, but also inline links. Your everyday work can become a content-rich wiki with tons of internal links to different objects, saving you lots of time navigating among them.
In order to create links like this, simply use this syntax: [ keyword ].
The keyword can be anything, ranging from topic title, contact name, or even tag name. Take the image as an example, the real text was [Thomas Anderson], and within the same database there was a contact profile for Thomas Anderson.
What if you have several topics with the same title?
In this case, simply use “[ topic title ]” is definitely going to cause problems. So, instead you can use [ UID ], where “UID” is a series of characters that point to the specific item in the database. To get the UID for a topic, simply search for the topic, and hover your mouse onto the topic in the search results. Topics and contact profiles all have UIDs.
In this example, you would write “[T00000F4]” for a link to the topic named “Telematic Opera”.
Pagico 4
In Pagico v4.0 and higher, you can also do a search of the desired contact profile, and drag the profile icon from the search result to the current topic/profile to create a link.
Also starting from Pagico v4.0, the UIDs are nine characters long (instead of eight in Pagico v3.x, as shown in the screenshot above).
Inserting files into Contact Profiles
Inserting files to profiles is very easy. Just open up the profile, then drag and drop the files into the Pagico window. The files will be inserted as an activity with a date of the current day.
You can also add some notes to the body of the activity.
Inserting Email messages
There are many ways to insert email messages into topics.
Inserting “EML” files (Mac-only)
EML files are email messages exported from Apple Mail. Locate the email message you want to insert in Apple Mail, then drag that message from the message list to your desktop. Apple Mail will create an “EML” file for that message on your desktop. Simply drag that EML file into your Pagico.
Inserting “MSG” files (Windows-only)
MSG files are email messages exported from Microsoft Outlook. The same story as above, just drag that email message from Outlook to your desktop (or export as an MSG file), then drag that file into your topic. After inserting, you can open that message by double-clicking the message file in the topic.
Linking to messages in Apple Mail or Microsoft Outloook is also possible, with some help from 3rd party applications. Learn more about this.
Associate Topics with Contact Profiles
It is very often that a project (topics) involves several people (contact profiles). In this case, you can link them together.
To link a topic with contacts, simply open up that topic, scroll down to the foot notes section, then click on the “Add” link in the “People related to this topic” section.
You can pick a contact to link with from the contact profile drop-down list, or create a new profile and link with it, by entering the desired name and hit “enter”.
You can also see all the linked topics from contact profiles, but you can’t link to topics from contact profiles.
Export / Print a contact profile as PDF files
Pagico allows you to export contact profiles as PDF files. In order to do so, just open up the contact profile you’d like to export, click on the “Print” link in the upper right corner of the profile.
Once you’ve done so, a printer-friendly version of the current contact profile will be created and displayed in a separate window.
Use the menu command “Edit -> Print as PDF” to save the printer-friendly version to your computer.
Data Detector
Note
This feature has been discontinued starting from Pagico v4.0. It is replaced by a better feature called Click-and-link.
It’s very easy to write out tasks, dates, or other information in plain text, but not so easy to add them to the right place — re-writing them is definitely boring.
A recognized task
Pagico can recognize important information such as tasks (action items) and dates from plain text, so you’re one-click away from adding them as a task into your Pagico.
Whenever something is recognized by Pagico, they’ll become click-able, and by clicking on it, you can add that information to the proper place, such as, set up a date for a recognized task, or set up an appointment with somebody for a recognized date.
This feature is available throughout Pagico — text notes and list descriptions in topics, tasks and activities from profiles, or even QuickNotes and MobileNote you sent from your shiny iPhone.
Just imagine you wrote an action list on the go, and when you’re back, just a few clicks, these words are turned into tasks.
Tips & Hints for writing tasks
Just write something like this:
- Buy milk
- Call phone service
…
or, this would work too:
1. Buy milk
2. Call phone service
…
Smart Grouping: Organize Contacts in Groups, automatically
Contact profiles will be grouped automatically, based on their contact information. Pagico constantly process the contact information in the background, so whenever it found a “group-able” contact information, it will try to create a sub-tab under the “People” section in the sidebar.
People here in the left image are listed under “People -> Position” subtab, because all of them at least has one contact information: “Positiion”. And there are just 2 different values for “Position” in the contact database, so Pagico thinks this item is group-able and created a sub-group for it.
Tips & Hints
In order to have sub-tabs, you need to have:
1) Multiple contact profiles with common contact info items, such as “Position” or “City”, etc.
2) The values of the common items must not be unique in all these profiles. For example, “Tel” is probably never going to be “group-able”, because everybody is having a different number. In the example above, there are 5 people with “Position” item, but there are only 2 different values for the item: “Marketing” and “Sales”.