Tip of the day: Using context tags for notes, tasks and projects (via http://www.pagico.com)
Starting with Pagico 6, you can use the Smart Collections feature to collect your data (notes, tasks and projects) based on keywords (also known as context tags in GTD). If used properly, this feature can be incredibly useful. Here’s how we do it: Step 1: Tag items properly In Pagico, literally everything…
From time to time you might need to insert URLs (web links) into projects or contact profiles. There are two ways to do so:
1. Create a new note, and paste the URL into the note body. Once saved, Pagico will convert the text link into click-able links.
2. Starting from Pagico v5, you can directly drag the URL (from your web browser) into Pagico window. The link will be processed by Pagico, and saved as a bookmark resource. This way it’s visually more elegant, and the URL will appear as a bookmark file item that you can move around and perform various other actions.
Note
This article describes features that are only available in Pagico version 5 or later.
To reduce visual clutter, you can fold and expand objects, such as notes, lists, and files.
To fold or expand single objects, please hover your mouse over the designated object and click on the arrow icon located at the left-upper corner of the object.
If you need to expand or fold all the objects in the current view, just click the “Expand All” or “Fold All” buttons located in the toolbar.
This feature is available for projects, contact profiles, and your Inbox.
Note
This article involves features that requires Pagico v4 and higher.
In many cases, you might want to attach files to specific tasks (or list items). To do this, you just need to utilize the interlink feature.
In this example, I’m trying to attach the file (Sample Page.html) to the task (Review page design). Please note that the file does not need to be immediately after the actual task (or list). It could be placed anywhere within the same project (or contact profile).
In this case, simply write something like: Look at [Sample Page.html]. You can do the same with text notes, too. Save the current item to see the link.
Syntax for inline linking to files
You can use square brackets to link to files in the same container (project or contact profile) by referring to their names:
[ filename ]
In most cases, to reduce clutter you might want to hide the actual file items after linking them with tasks or notes. You can actually do this by hovering your mouse onto the file item, and click on the “Hide” button. The file item will be invisible, unless you check the “Show hidden items” checkbox, which is located in the right upper corner of the current project (or contact profile).
The “References” panel, introduced in Pagico v4.1, is designed to automatically collect and display all the sources who have inline links pointing to the current topic or contact profile.
You may also be interested in how to write inline links.
Note
The feature described in this article is only available in Pagico v4 or later.
In many cases, you will want to expand a certain concept (task or person’s name, etc) by creating a project (or contact profile) with the same title and link to it. Thankfully, starting from Pagico v4, this action can be really easy: simply select the portion of text, and choose the desired option.
Select the text, hover onto the black icon, and choose the action
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.
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.
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 collections are just like regular folders, and you can add content to it manually by clicking the “+” button in the collection.
Smart CollectionSmart collections are just like the smart playlists in music players. You can set up one or more keywords (tags), based on which the content of the collection will be collected automatically. This includes containers (projects & contacts) as well as data objects (notes, and list items, etc). This makes it very useful to track tasks of certain kind (e.g. tasks with “@call” tags), which is similar to the Context component in GTD.
To delete a collection, you need to open the collection, switch to the Settings panel, and click the “Delete” button there. Deleting a collection does not remove its content (projects, contacts, and data objects).
The destination selection panel, a newly introduced feature since v3.3, allows you to move stuff around, among projects and contact profiles (restrictions apply, see below).
To do so, simply hover on the item you’d like to move, then click on the “Move to…” button to see the destination selection panel. Then check all the desired destinations (an object can be moved to multiple destinations at once!), and click “Confirm” button to start the move process.
Also, you can type in the “Search” text box to filter the result list as you type.
In the destination selection panel, you have the choice of keeping the original or not. By checking this checkbox, the original object will not be removed, i.e. making copies.
If you think the first level of your TagExplore browser is too crowded (because it displays every one of your tags), and not all of them are suitable for being in the first level. Then you can hide some of them.
To do so, simply open the database preferences panel (the preference item labeled with your database’ name), and scroll to the bottom. Check the “Hide selected tags” option, and get rid of unwanted tags by dragging it from the left list to the right.
Dragging tags to the right list doesn’t mean you’re deleting them — instead, they are just not going to be displayed in the root (first) level of your TagExplore browser.
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 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 project 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 projects with the same title?
In this case, simply use “[project title]” is definitely going to cause problems. So, instead you can use [UID]. UID is the identifier of items stored in the database, and it will never be repetitive. To get the UID for a specific item, simply search for the item (let’s say, a project), and hover your mouse onto the item in the search result. In Pagico, every single item has a UID, and you can use it to create links.
In this example, you can write “[T00000F4]” for a link to the project named “Telematic Opera”.
By using UIDs, you can create inline-links to not just projects or contacts, but also any other objects such as text notes, lists, and files, etc.
Starting from Pagico v4.0, you can also do a search of the desired contact profile, and drag the profile icon from the search result to the current project/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).
When you have dozens of projects, it is nearly impossible to efficiently organize them. But with the unique tag browser, Pagico makes it very easy to navigate among your ocean of tags and locate projects effortlessly. Let’s say John is a computer products dealer. He manages his inventories with Pagico. Take a look at the his database in the tag browser (located right in the Projects view).
As you can see, the tags were organized in a hierarchical structure. When John needs something, he just navigate through the tags, and the results are automatically presented below the TagExplore browser.
Your database can be this efficient, too. Just go ahead and tag your projects like you would with your blog. As things accumulate, Pagico will automatically organize your tags like the image above, and you’ll be able to benefit from it like John. So, the advantage is obvious: it’s like you have an unlimited-depth folder structure for your projects, but you don’t have to spend time maintaining the structure itself.
That was a simple explanation. But, how does it work? Read More
Note
Starting from Pagico v4.2 r1002, the term “Topic” was deprecated and replaced with term “Projects”.
Projects can be considered as “containers” or, “folders”. They can store all kinds of resources in it, such as notes (text paragraph), lists, tasks, images, and all kinds of file attachments.
So the basic idea is, you create a project with a title, then centralize all related resources by storing them within this project (the data container). A topic can be ideally used for many occasions. Here are a few examples. Read More
Some times you need to lock a specific project, in addition to the database password.
Important: Once set, the password can not be recovered if forgotten.
In order to do so, simply open up that project, then click the “Lock” icon in the upper right corner. After clicking the button, you’ll see a password panel, asking you to enter twice the password you desired.
Once your topic is locked, Pagico will ask for password whenever this topic is being opened. The lock button will be highlighted when the current project is being protected by password.
To cancel a password protection on a project, simply click on the highlighted lock button again. The password protection will be removed immediately.
Password Hint
Pagico has a very advanced password hinting system, preventing you from forgetting passwords. It will only activate when passwords are longer than 5 characters.
It basically reminds you the password by providing you the information such as some key characters in the password, and distance between these characters. If you use several sets of passwords in different occassions, this feature will help you easily remember which one you used in this topic.
Tips & Hints
Use longer and complicated passwords to prevent your password being guessed by someone else.
There are many ways to insert email messages into projects and contact profiles.
Inserting “EML” files (Mac-only)
Note: Starting from Pagico v5.2 r1232, email messages can now be dragged directly from Apple Mail into Pagico without being saved as EML first. In the mean time, the method described below is still valid.
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 the desired project (or profile) in Pagico.
Linking to messages in Apple Mail or Microsoft Outloook is also possible, with some help from 3rd party applications. Learn more about this.
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 project. After inserting, you can open that message by double-clicking the message file in the project.
Some times multiple topics are related. Then you can link them together. Linked topics will be displayed as foot notes.
In order to do so, simply open up a topic, scroll down to the foot note area, then click the “Add” link in the “Linked topic” section. A drop-down list containing all the existing topics will be display, so you can pick the one you’d like to link with. Or, you can create a new topic and link to it, by entering its desired title in the text box.
The reverse link will be created automatically, meaning that if you’re linking from topic A to topic B, then you’ll be able to see topic A was a linked topic in topic B’s foot note section.
You can also write inline links to topics and profiles.
In Pagico v4.0 and higher, you can also do a search of the desired topics, and drag the topic icon from the search result to the current topic to create a link.
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.
To set up tasks (or Action Item) in a project, you need to create a list first.
To do so, simply click the “+” (add) button, and “New Task/List” in the menu.
After doing so, you’ll see an untitled list being created, and you’re automatically focused on a new list item. Go ahead and enter the task details. Then, set up the due date by either typing dates or clicking on the date icon to select a date.
The description line is optional. Click “Save” or hit “enter” to save the task item.
You can edit the title of the list (by default is “Untitled”) to something that makes sense to you, such as “Tasks”.
There are also advanced (more flexible and faster) ways of entering the dates, too.
Drag & Drop
Inserting files into projects is very easy. Simply just open up that project, then drag the files on your computer into the Pagico window, and they will be imported into the database.
Images files (bmp, jpg, tiff, gif) will be recognized and their thumbnail preview will be displayed. Other type of documents will be displayed as files with their icons.
Linking to a file
Normally when you’re importing files, a copy of the files will be made and stored in your current database. However, some times you may want to link to an external file rather than duplicating it for various reasons. In order to do so, just press and hold “Option” key (on Mac) or “Shift” key (on Windows and Linux systems) while dropping the file into Pagico. By doing so, an alias will be created and stored in the database, without duplicating the original file.
Opening (launching) the file in a project
Just double-click on the file icon (or the thumbnail image)! It’s that simple.
Creating blank documents right in the project
If you need to just create a blank Word document, or Keynote presentation, or anything like this, you may not need to launch the application at all. Pagico has tons of popular file templates built in. Learn more about this feature.
Tips & Hints
Not all documents are recognized by Pagico. So you might see a generic file icon displayed for files that are not recognized. But you’ll still be able to open and use it, as long as your operating system recognizes them and knows which application is associated with them.
Tags are very efficient to categorize your projects. They are “keywords” that describe your projects.
To add / edit tags of a project, simply open that project, then click on the “Edit” link under the project title. Use comma to separate different tags. Tags are case-insensitive.
The benefit of adding tags to projects in Pagico is tremendous. Here is some of the advantages:
Creating a new project is easy. Just switch to “Projects” section, type in the desired project title, and then press “enter” to create it.
Or, if you’re not sure about the project title, just hit “enter” without typing anything in the text box. Pagico will automatically create a new project named “Untitled”.
Want something faster?
If you’re a keyboard geek, then you might use the keyboard combination: “Command + N” (on Mac), or “Ctrl + N” (on Windows and Linux machines). Pagico will automatically create an “Untitled” project when you use this keyboard shortcut.