Organize Your Information With AskSam 4

Even computer-savvy users expect databases to be huge, hard to use, and best for storing and searching vast quantities of business data. The beauty of AskSam 4, the most recent version of a venerable product, is that it can manage large amounts of text but it's quick to learn and easy to use for much smaller data collections as well. In fact, creating and managing more-modest databases--containing information such as addresses, research documents, or e-mail--is where AskSam really shines.

The standard version of AskSam 4 sells for $150; the professional version, with full-text indexing (which speeds searches) and a word list for quick document lookups, runs $395. A 30-day trial version is available in our Downloads library.

AskSam excels at managing documents. It's free-form, which means that you can store complete documents in their original form rather than chopping up their contents into individual fields. Records within AskSam look like word-processing documents and you can edit them just as if you were using a word processor, but you get the added benefit of powerful search and retrieval tools.

For those who prefer to work with data fields, as in a structured database, AskSam lets you create fields and import data directly into them when you create records. You can import structured data from Microsoft Excel, Access, or Outlook, as well as from Qualcomm Eudora and other database and delimited file formats. It's very easy to modify entry forms and create new ones, and you can use a combination of free-form text and fields for structured data within the same record. We saved an Outlook Express address book as comma-delimited text and then imported all of the entries into AskSam in just a few steps.

AskSam 4 supports file sizes up to 16 terabytes (16,000 gigabytes), so you probably won't outgrow your database no matter how many legal documents, research papers, or Internet articles you cram into it. But when you import a file into your database, you're copying the file, not moving it or pointing to the original, so you could end up consuming quite a bit of hard drive space with duplicates of documents, although you can "pack" your database.

AskSam gets you started in a nonintimidating fashion, providing templates for databases to store a variety of document types. The first page of each template provides links to common tasks such as adding new records, searching the database, or running reports, as well as instructions on using and modifying the database.

In addition to the templates and wizards, you get a short getting-started guide and an inch-thick user guide that delves into AskSam's more complex features. To receive the hard-copy documentation and a CD-ROM, you must pay to have them shipped (the cost is $10 for shipping within the United States, higher for other countries).

The free-form nature of AskSam makes it an excellent tool for archiving e-mail messages, although it imports mail folders directly from only Microsoft Outlook or Qualcomm Eudora. Because we were using Microsoft's Outlook Express, our choices were between individually saving e-mail messages as text files (no thanks) and using a conversion program to change Express's .dbx folders to the Eudora .mbx format. We opted for the latter, and our conversion and import process ran smoothly.

To create a really useful document collection, it's often necessary to pull together information from many different sources, in different formats. AskSam lets you import multiple file types into the same database easily. For example, we imported Word documents, Web pages, and spreadsheets (after saving them as text-delimited files) into our e-mail database and then created reports from the mixed database.

AskSam also comes in handy for storing articles, from the Web or scanned from printed publications. Using the Clips template, we imported both Word documents and HTML files into a database. Then we could sort the articles by publication, author, or date--information that we had to enter manually into structured fields during the data entry process.

It's no easier to browse full-length documents in AskSam than it is to browse them in their native applications, but AskSam helps you find needles in haystacks with its searching and reporting tools. You can create complex searches with Boolean operators and then save your search for reuse. You can also search multiple databases at the same time. In addition, you can customize how your results appear by modifying the search properties.

If you have a lot of information floating around on your hard drive that you'd like to organize and retrieve quickly, and you don't want to learn to use FileMaker Pro or Microsoft Access, AskSam 4 may be the answer--and the price is right.