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Topics can be considered as “containers” or, “folders”. They can contain lots of information in it, such as, notes (text paragraph), lists, tasks, images, and all kinds of file attachments.

So the basic idea is, you create a topic with a title, then centralize everything related this title, and put those contents into the topic. A topic can be ideally used for many occasions. Here are some examples.

Project (Event) Planning

Create an Action List by creating a list, then input all the list items in there, with due dates if applicable. After doing this, you not only have a series of ToDo lists for the project (event), but also can keep track of them with Pagico's Schedule Management features.

In addition to keeping track of ToDo lists, you can also put in files such as a map of where the event is going to be held, a PDF file of the project proposal, or a PowerPoint presentation for the project.

Research Papers

Writing research papers involves a lot of information and resources, centralizing these resources can greatly increase your efficiency. Just create a topic for a research paper. Then put all the related resources such as: notes, the paper (the Word document), files (related file attachments and images), and tasks (action list). So whenever you open this topic, you have everything you need to work on the project.

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Or, if you’re not sure about the topic title, just hit “enter” without typing anything in the text box. Pagico will automatically create a new topic 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” topic when you use this keyboard shortcut.

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To do so, simply click the “Add…” button, and “List” in the menu.

After doing so, you’ll see an “Untitled” list is created, and you’re focusing on an list item. Go ahead and enter the task name, for example: buy milk. Then, set up the due date by clicking in the “Due Dates” input box, and selecting the date in the popup mini-calendar.

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 also advanced (more flexible and faster) ways of entering the dates, too.

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Drag & Drop

Inserting files into topics is very easy. Simply just open up that topic, 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 files dragged into the topic will be duplicated and saved in your current database. However, some times you may want to link to an external file rather than duplicating it. In order to do so, just press and hold “Option” key (on Mac) or “Ctrl” 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 topic

Just double-click on the file icon (or the thumbnail image)! It’s that simple.

Creating blank documents right in the topic

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 recognizable by Pagico. So maybe you’ll see an generic file icon displayed for files that are not recognized. But you’ll still be able to open it, as long as your operating system recognize them and know which application is associated with them.

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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.

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Tags are very efficient to categorize your topics. They work like “keywords” to describe the content of the topic.

To add / edit tags of a topic, simply open that topic, then click on the “Edit” link under the topic title. Use comma to separate different tags. Tags are case-insensitive.

The benefit of adding tags to topics in Pagico is tremendous. Here is some of the advantages:

• Take advantage of the state-of-the-art tag-based topic browser TagExplore
• Tags are search-able.
• Tags can be used as a criteria in Smart Groups.

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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 topics 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 topics, but you don’t have to spend time maintaining the structure itself.

That was a simple explanation. But, how does it work?

Basically, Pagico reads all the tags you have in your topics, and keeps track of them in a complicated way. Simply put, Pagico processes all the tags, and for each one (let’s call it “mothertag” here), Pagico searches all the topics that include this tag, and all other tags that are used in these topics. These “other tags”, then, are considered as “subtags” to the mothertag.

Tips & Hints

Tag topics in detail, and use re-usable words for tags. For example, a topic named “MacBook Pro” can be at least tagged as “Apple, Hardware, Laptop”. Another example here: a topic named “Business trip to Atlanta” can be tagged as “Business, atlanta, meeting”, etc.

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Note
This feature is deprecated, and is being replaced by Collections in Pagico v4.0 and higher.

Although Pagico provides the revolutionary TagExplore browser, you can still use the old way to organize your topics: Groups. Groups are like “Folders”, which groups topics together, either manually or dynamically based on search criterias.

To create a new group, simply click the “+” icon in the “Data” section in the sidebar.

The created groups will be listed under the “Data” section, as sub-items.

Editing the group

When you’re in the group, you can click on its title panel to activate the editing mode, in which you can edit the group title, as well as the content (topics). To add topics into the current group, simply drag topics from the right list to the left. And to remove topics from the current group, simply drag topics from the left list back to the right. You can also re-order the topics in the group by dragging and dropping.

To delete a group, simply open that group, and click the “trash” icon in the upper right corner of the right panel.

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Note
This feature is deprecated, and is being replaced by Collections in Pagico v4.0 and higher.

In addition of hank picking topics for a group, you can also let Pagico do the job based on your criteria. Simply create a group, activate the editing mode, and select the “Choose topics by criteria” option.

With this option turned on, your current group is changed to a “smart group”, which will include topics based on the criteria you set. Need more than one line of criteria? Not a problem. Simply click on the “+” button next to the text input box to create another one.

Live update?

This option is by defaut not turned on, which means after automatically picking out topics that match your criteria, Pagico turns the group back to a regular group, which contains all the topics. You can manually edit the topics later.

If the option is turned on, then this group will stay “smart”, and it will be updated automatically: getting rid of topics that no longer match the criteria, and including new matched ones. The down side is that you can’t manually edit the content of the group. But hey, you can always turn the group back to a regular group and do the edit.

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To do so, just click the “Add …” button in a topic, and click the “More” menu item. Then you’ll see a list of four different document types.

Click any one of them will have a blank document of that type created in your current topic.

Customizing the list

You can click the “Customize” link to customize the list, so four of your most commonly used document types can be in the list in all topics.

To customize, just drag the application type you want to the top row. All of them will be available in all topics, in the “Add content” menu.

Can’t find the application you need the most?

Shoot us an email about it, and we’ll consider adding it to Pagico.

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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.

Pagico 4

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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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).

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Also, the description text box can be resized, too, by dragging the little handle in the right lower corner of the text box.

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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.

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