PK Tip: Finding Articles Related to an Entire Keyword Group

Taken literally, keyword groups contain keywords, not articles. However, you can easily locate all articles which are associated with any keywords which are members of an entire keyword group.

PK Tip: Using Keywords and Titles for Effective Search

In Personal Knowbase, you can use an article's keywords, title, and date fields as tools to more easily and quickly search your data file with the Find command (from the Edit menu). Here are some suggestions:

Cleaning Up Old Personal Knowbase Data Files (Part 2)

If your old Personal Knowbase data files are getting cluttered and you feel like you're no longer familiar with what they're storing, it might be time for a little file maintenance.

In Part 1, we talked about the cleaning up your file's keywords. Here are more ideas for working with your articles and the files themselves.

Cleaning Up Old Personal Knowbase Data Files (Part 1)

Does your old Personal Knowbase data file require a little maintenance or cleanup?

Personal Knowbase is stable and uses little hard drive space. You're unlikely to have problems if you just let old unused articles and keywords accumulate. But obsolete articles can clutter up and slow down search and query results. And, if you're a little obsessive about being organized, like me, they can irritate.

PK Tip: Locating Related Keywords with Related Mode

When you select a keyword in Personal Knowbase's Index Window, you may get a long list of articles associated with that keyword. To shrink your Titles list, it's useful to know which keywords to select to make the list more manageable.

You can reduce the Index column from listing all keywords in your data file to only listing the keywords that are related to your current articles list. This shows you the keywords related to the keyword(s) that you've already selected by being shared by at least one article. This makes it easy to see which keywords will help further pare down your Titles list.

PK Tip: Dragging Keywords to Locate Related Articles

In Personal Knowbase, the usual way to locate an article related to a topic of interest is to "select" a keyword for that topic. For example, to see all your articles related to fish, you move the keyword fish from the Index column to the Selected column in the Index Window.

But if you already located an article on your topic, you can quickly locate related articles by dragging keywords from the article instead of from the full keyword Index. This is especially useful as your keyword Index list grows larger and more difficult to browse.

PK Tip: Creating Special Keywords

In Personal Knowbase, your keyword Index list is generally sorted alphabetically. But you might have special keywords that you use frequently and want to be able to access instantly.

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: 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.