Mental Rolodex?

September 9, 2005 7:35 AM

So, I'm writing this book, and I need some software advice for making a computerized version of my mental rolodex. (DIT)

Like I said, I'm writing this book, and I have a massive amount of notes and information. I'm looking for some sort of software (for XP) that will allow me to maintain this as a database, with links to search terms.

For example, I'd like to have top level tags such as locations. I'd be able to click on "location", and it would bring up all of my entries containing this tag. I would then be able to reduce this list by using sub tags, such as "Temperature", "Climate", etc...

I have a large collection of data I've developed over the years, covering a very broad range of topics, and I'd really like to organize it. Most of the entries are in the 1-2k range, although some are bigger (some much bigger). Many entries contain images, and many contain tables, formulas and the like. It's not just straight text.

I found Treepad (http://www.treepad.com), but I'm not sure if this is what I want. I suppose I could go with a MySQL/Access database, but I'm not sure this is possible.

Any advice would be great.

Thanks in advance,
KFJ

posted by kungfujoe to computers & internet (5 comments total)

FreeMind may do what you want. I personally couldn't get the hang of it, but it seems to match some of your requirements, like collapsable/expandable trees of categorized information.
posted by odinsdream at 8:19 AM on September 9, 2005

Even though I don't like to support them, Microsoft's Onenote software is pretty good for what you describe.
posted by blueyellow at 10:53 AM on September 9, 2005

There are other similar programs to onenote (wikipad, evernote) on this other question (today).
posted by blueyellow at 12:00 PM on September 9, 2005

I asked a very similar question yesterday.
posted by nitsuj at 12:18 PM on September 9, 2005

There's a tool specifically for writers that includes an outliner, "scrapbook", journal and brainstorming tools, but I'm not sure how well that would scale for massive amounts of information. Review here.

Other than that, a local install of WordPress comes to mind; you could have posts for every chunk of information and use the category system for organizing the chunks. Creating links between posts and to local images and files should be easy. Transferring lots of data into the system might take forever, though.
posted by mumble at 12:29 PM on September 9, 2005