Neither option requires the DevonThink program to be open to work. Another option is the “clip to DevonThink” extension available to both Safari and Firefox users. (While it is possible to keep a database entirely Indexed by moving non-Indexed items out to the Finder and Indexing them back to the database, that requires user actionI’ll confess. One such plugin is the DevonThink dashboard widget, which allows users to input notes quickly. For example, captures from the Web directly to a database, scanner output sent to DEVONthink Pro Office for OCR, notes that are created within DEVONthink, etc. Mail and Microsoft Exchange, as well as other popular Unix-based programs such as Mozilla Thunderbird.Īlthough DevonThink is a full-featured program, it comes with several ancillary plugins that extend its usefulness beyond the actual DevonThink program itself. One of the DevonThink’s other main features is its ability to archive emails through its import program.

DevonThink also includes a number of smart groups (you can add others, too) for easy reference as well. The app contains a separate tag browser that makes finding files easier, provided that you tagged them when you imported them, of course. Tags are also prevalent throughout DevonThink and compliment the OCR scanned documents. The fact that the feature works as well as it does is equally important to its viability in an office setting. Its just a standard find/replace window that acts on the currently selected document. Assuming many offices do as I do and scan important documents into a hard drive, the ability to create searchable databases of thousands of physical documents is arguably the most important feature of DevonThink. Somewhat limited is also the search feature implemented in DevonThink. The OCR feature is huge for offices seeking to go paperless. In subsequent testing the OCR feature worked as advertised. After importing the receipt into DevonThink, the OCR feature allowed me to search for the street address of the store and the other text on the receipt as well. The iPhone sales receipt includes information such as the street address of the store where I bought the phone, information that exists only on the scanned receipt and not in the file name or tags associated with the document. To do so, I imported my original iPhone 3G purchase receipt from 2008 into the application. As mentioned earlier, I routinely scan important documents into my Mac so I was eager to test this feature. The primary reason DevonThink can be valuable to paperless offices is its support for OCR, which translates text from scanned documents and PDFs into searchable text. I imported several important files, documents, and PDFs and let DevonThink do the rest using its default settings. I then sorted most of the documents on my Mac accordingly. Although you can create as many databases as you’d like in DevonThink, I created two for review purposes, a personal and a professional database.

Devonthink pro search within