PK Tip: Copying Articles to a Word Processor

Do you need to dump a group of Personal Knowbase articles into your word processor (or other software) fast?

Don't bother with the Export command. Simply copy-and-paste the entire group of articles directly from Personal Knowbase's Index Window.

PK Tip: Finding Articles Which Have No Keywords

Sometimes, in the rush of creating and saving articles, you may forget to assign keywords to every article. Or, you may delete a keyword, leaving an article with no keywords, if that was the article's only keyword.

However it happens, over time, you may discover that you have articles in your Personal Knowbase data file which do not have keywords assigned to them.

You can easily locate any articles with no keywords:

PK Tip: Getting a Custom Text Color Back

In Personal Knowbase, if you create text using a custom color from the color picker, its color swatch is available for re-use next to the Other button on the color down-drop from the Formatting Toolbar. For example, after making orange text, my color menu looks like this:

PK Tip: Running a Faster Find

Personal Knowbase's Find command (from the Edit menu) takes longer as the number (and length) of articles grows. The software does a straight string search for Find, so the search time is a function of the amount of text searched. Here are some tips for speeding up your Find operations.

PK Tip: Checking for Unassigned Keywords

Over time, you will inevitably discover that you have keywords in your Personal Knowbase data file that are not assigned to any articles. Perhaps you've deleted the articles that they were originally assigned to. Or you created keywords you intended to use, but your needs changed.

Of course, there are valid reasons to keep some unassigned keywords. There may be keywords you aren't currently using, but may need again in the future. Or you may want to keep complete sets of keywords for fixed groups like months or days of the week. Or you may want a keyword for each member of your club, even if no articles yet pertain to some members.

PK Tip: Assigning a Keyword to Multiple Articles

Do you need to add a keyword to a group of articles? You don't need to open each article and add the keyword separately to each one. You can assign a keyword to multiple articles at once in Personal Knowbase's Index Window by dragging it.

PK Tips for Protecting Your Data in Portable Mode

If you're using Personal Knowbase's portability mode to carry your notes with you on removable media such as a USB drive, you have extra security risks. Here are tips for protecting your data.

PK Tip: Merging Keywords

Occasionally, you may discover that you have two (or more) keywords in your Personal Knowbase data file that are redundant. Plurals, alternate spellings, and abbreviations are common culprits.

PK Tip: Suppressing the Warning Message for Saving Articles

When you first start using Personal Knowbase, the software always asks you to verify that you want to save an article when you close it. As you become more familiar with the software, you may find these verification dialog boxes unnecessary, perhaps annoying.

The dialog box itself gives you the option to stop showing it for the rest of the current PK session. However, the next time you start up PK again, the warning dialogs will be back.

If you find yourself always disabling these dialog boxes, you may want to turn them off permanently and never see them again.

PK Tip: Finding Text across Multiple Knowbase Data Files

Personal Knowbase has no built-in way to search for a text string across multiple data files.

However, within a single PK session, the Find dialog box remembers its settings, even after you've opened a different file. So you can search for the same string using the same range and search settings by opening each data file consecutively and re-running Find without changing the settings.