Submitted by jimspoon on 2025/02/10 04:20

I just happened to notice a BitsDuJour email informing me that Ultra Recall was being offered for sale today.  In some ways I'm a bit surprised, in other ways not.  Years ago I tried it out and I thought it had some good features, but there were some things that made me give it up.  I was especially annoyed how my UR version would no longer work after I updated to a newer version of Windows, forcing me to pay to a newer version of UR.  Finally I made the transition from Ecco to IQ, and I found IQ to be vastly superior to UR.  Also UR development practically stopped for a long time and still very slow, again far inferior to what we see with IQ.

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For anyone who is wondering about whether to take advantage of the BDJ deal, my two cents: I use both IQ and UR, and I find them complementary rather than mutually exclusive, with each one performing important functions which the other basically lacks - and this is of course not a criticism of either program, but stems rather from their different orientations. Thus, I use IQ to handle the vast majority of my information management needs (particularly research notes and outlining, as well as personal project and task management). Indeed, I find IQ utterly indispensable and truly incomparable in this regard. UR, on the other hand, is (at least for me) usually the best way to organize and locate info in my files, mainly PDFs and Word documents of both a personal nature and of research-related material = academic articles. And it often does this better than even sophisticated file managers, such as Directory Opus and XYplorer, thanks to its built-in search options (among other features).

I took advantage of the deal and I'm interested in that exact use. The UR manual is fine and polished but I'm having a tough time quickly putting all the pieces together.  Do you mind giving me a brief quick start on which method  you accessed the pdf/doc files within UR, and search features that are better than xyplorer?  Many thanks!

Very briefly, the best thing to do is to create a folder structure within UR, and then drag relevant PDF or Word files into relevant folders - and I highly recommend that you store their contents within UR, rather than just linking to the relevant files on your computer (see below). You can then find the files either by using UR's search function, or, if you remember the UR folder where they are stored (or linked), you can look there.

The principal advantages of UR over XYplorer are (a) in UR, the same file can reside simultaneously in multiple folders (e.g. by dragging the file to a new UR folder while holding Alt); (b) in UR, you can conduct extremely sophisticated Boolean searches, including on text within files; (c) if your files are stored within UR and you open your UR database on another computer, all of the labels ("flags" in UR terminology) and keywords are fully accessible on the other computer. By contrast, with XYplorer, files labels set in one computer won't automatically transfer to another computer, even if the files are otherwise identical (e.g. Dropbox files).

HTH! And if you have further questions, probably best to ask in the Outlinersoftware.com forum, where there are plenty of knowledgeable people (probably better and faster than me) happy to help! 

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