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Latest on Fri, 01:20 pm: Is there any way to have project tasks without Due Dates show up on the Dashboard/All Tasks screen?
: Just starting out, is there a way to hide completed tasks? or is there other ways to deal? just delete?
: Could someone please tell me if Pagico would let me set up recurring events like birthdays? If not, is there any way of making Windows calendar interact with it?
: @Meredith, Please check out the latest article (filed under Troubleshooting) regarding this issue. Thanks!
: Just starting out with Pagico & think it's great. Is there a way to show/hide the description text for Tasks?
Managing Projects and Events
- Video Tutorial: Resource Management in Pagico
- Projects
- Creating a new project
- Setting up tasks (todo lists) in projects
- Inserting documents, images, and other files into projects
- Inserting Email messages
- Manage topics using tags
- Browse projects using the TagExplore feature
- Using “Groups” to organize topics
- Setting up “smart groups” for topics
- Create new documents in projects and contact profiles
- Inter-linking topics
- Associate Topics with Contact Profiles
- Inline-Linking to topics or contact profiles
- Linking files with tasks (and vice versa)
- Name Change: Topics are now called Projects
- Using the “References” panel
- Video Tutorial: Interlink Everything
- Click-and-link
- Collections
- Moving things among projects and profiles
- Writing multiple-line list item descriptions
- Hiding specific tags from the root level of TagExplore
- Locking individual projects
- Data Detector
Projects
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
Creating a new project
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.
Setting up tasks (todo lists) in projects
Watch the Video Tutorial!
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 “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.
Read More
Inserting documents, images, and other files into projects
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 “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 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.
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.
Manage topics using tags
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.
Browse projects using the TagExplore feature
When you have dozens of projects, it is nearly impossible to efficiently organize them. But with the TagExplore 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 TagExplore browser below.
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
Using “Groups” to organize topics
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.
Setting up “smart groups” for topics
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.
Create new documents in projects and contact profiles
Pagico has many popular document types built-in, so you can create these documents easily in projects and/or contact profiles..
To do so, just click the Plus (+) button, 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 project or contact profile.
Customizing the list
You can click the “Customize” link to customize what choices show up in the popup menu.
To customize, just drag the application type you want to the top row. All items in the first row will be available in the popup menu.
Can’t find the application you need the most?
Shoot us an email about it, and we’ll consider adding it to Pagico.
Inter-linking topics
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.
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.
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.
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).
Linking files with tasks (and vice versa)
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.
Step 1: Create the task (or list item), and import the file(s)
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).
Step 2: Write an inline link to the file in the task description area
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 ]
Step 3: Clean up by hiding the actual files (optional)
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).
Name Change: Topics are now called Projects
In order to improve user experience, a few names were changed along with Pagico v4.2 r1002. Starting from this release, the term Topics was replaced with Projects. This change does not affect any existing functionalities.
The change has been applied within the software (including the user manual), and we’ve also started the update process on our websites. So occasionally you might still be able to see a few left-overs here and there on our website for reference purposes, but all new articles will be using the new term.
Using the “References” panel
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.
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 projects and profiles
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).
Moving text notes, lists and files
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.
Keeping the original?
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.
Hiding specific tags from the root level of TagExplore
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.
Locking individual projects
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.
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
…