Creating a useful stack library takes place over time, becoming exponentially more valuable as it grows. Chances are, your library will grow very naturally over time as you type in or gather all sorts of tidbits and scraps of information. You might want to initially cut-and-paste address books and contact information, recipes, or even diary entries that you have scattered about already. In most cases you will want the individual entries to become individual notes in your stack and not combine them into larger notes. Usually a large number of small notes will be easier to maintain than fewer large notes, but you will likely have an assortment of every size.
One excellent use is to create daily "Daylog" entries that summarize events of the day (you can use the automatic date-stamp button to add the current date). Soon you will have a resource that will let you instantly find all the details of when and what happened regarding Aunt Martha just by searching your stack for all your notes containing the string "Aunt Martha". You can really impress the old gal when she calls and you quickly key "Aunt Martha" into the Frog search and all the Aunt Martha notes are instantly available for viewing. She will be impressed that you remember Mister Fluffy got barked at last week by that nasty dog next door. Remind her again about the importance of an up-to-date will, as you also discussed last time.
You can also simply cut sections from web pages or emails or any other source, including URLS (they will be clickable in NoteFrog™ and will open in a browser window) and paste the items into NoteFrog™ as new notes. The Frog even has an automatic clipboard-capture mode that makes the process incredibly simple (see the "Clip Capture" FAQ). You can browse the Net and create an entire catalogue of notes about any topic you wish and find that information instantly at any time in the future.
The point is, as your library of notes grows over time so will the power of your NoteFrog™ Information Management System... I LUV MY FROG T-shirts coming soon.
Why? Because most people are familiar with old-style information managers and the rigid structure they impose, there is a tendency to start out creating individual stacks for many categories. NoteFrog™ is unlike any system you have used before, and for many users only a handful of stacks will ever be necessary.
You are strongly encouraged to read the other question/answers in this section and understand the flexibility and power of "tagging" your notes. When you combine tags with the instant results of the NoteFrog™ compound search, you will regret having placed your data into many different stacks. A typical stack will consist of thousands of notes. You will certainly have many large notes, but you will also find that many small notes are almost always better than large notes containing a compilation of that same information.
On the other hand, as NoteFrog™ becomes more and more a part of your record keeping- and it will- you may well have the desire to separate your information into major categories. You might wish to have daylogs by year, possibly private password protected or even encrypted stacks, perhaps business and personal, or special projects. You may want the ability to share certain stacks with others by export/import, while keeping other stacks private. For those cases, and many more, additional stacks will become desirable.
For example, to search your notes for the specific string:
Tom, Dick and Harry
you would enter
tom, dick and harry
into the search box which would return only the notes containing that exact character-for-character string match. However to find all notes that contain all three names you would enter
tom[Enter]
dick[Enter]
harry
which would list all notes that contain those three names anywhere in the body of the note. The strings of a compound seach may be entered in any order. The intermediate results will of course vary, but the final result will be identical.
The NoteFrog™ compound search is so powerful and fast that you may easily and efficiently use NoteFrog™ for thousands of notes in many different Stacks and Stack Libraries and never need to add search "tags" to any of them. Most users will probably use tags only infrequently. Even the most intense users are unlikely to ever include tags in more than a small percentage of their notes. But at the same time, they can be extremely useful for many different purposes, including the creation of N-dimensional "Tree" structures (See the "Tree Structure" FAQ).
As an example, suppose you have a friend named Tom and over time you have created many notes that have his name somewhere in the note. If you wanted to find Tom's phone number or address or email, you might choose to add a special "flag" to the note or notes that contain that information. We call that sort of flag a "tag". In this case you might just tag those "important" notes about Tom with a ]]tom string added anywhere in those important notes. Then doing a search for "]]tom" would result in only those notes containing ]]tom appearing in the match list.
You might adopt a more flexible scheme for your tags. Perhaps using something like adding a "]]PB" to any note that contains "phonebook" type information for anyone. Then you would do a compound search by first entering "]]PB" in the search box and pressing the enter key. That would eliminate from the results list all notes not containing a phonebook entry "]]PB" string. Then search within those notes for "tom" or "dick" or "harry" or any other person. Note that when doing a compound search, the order in which the various search terms are entered makes no difference to the final result. You could have entered tom then carriage return then ]]PB and the final result would be identical- a listing of only those notes containing both the strings tom and ]]PB.
Additional examples are covered in other Q/A entries on this page.
While NoteFrog™ Professional allows multiple stacks for a high level of grouping, multiple stacks are not necessary for grouping notes since you may instead categorize/group items within a single stack in an unlimited, free form manner. You simply embed a "tag" or tags anywhere in the body of any note. It's best to choose a tag notation which is somewhat unique to make searching for the items easier and faster.
For example, here we will use tags that we create that begin with a double asterisk "**", but you may use any scheme you like. You might choose to identify (tag) phone book type items by adding a "**P" or "]]P" or ">P" in notes containing phone number contacts. Then, whenever you want to view and/or search all your phone book entries, just enter your tag "**P" in the search box and you'll see all the notes that you tagged as phone contacts. To search through those tagged notes, hit the "enter" key to continue a compound search within your phone book items.
If you want additional levels you just add additional tags.
The use of multiple tags allows for N-dimensional tree structures that can be built on the fly by simply including tags for every tree that an individual note might be associated with. Tagging an item by including anywhere in it the three tags:**Expenses **2010 **auto
provides everything old-style tree technology can do and much more, since you can produce a variety of tree results simply by using tags in any combination in a NoteFrog™ compound search.For example, searching for your tagged items by entering:
**expenses(enter)
**2008
will put you into a "tree" of all your 2008 expenses.
Searching for**expenses(enter)
**auto
All you need to do to add an item into any Frog-tree is add your "TAGs" anywhere in the item.
For example, adding !expenses to an item adds it to that "tree", adding **medical to that item adds it to the medical "tree", adding **medical and **drugs adds items to those trees, but not to the **expenses tree.The flexibility, power and simplicity of this approach far exceeds the capabilities of any normal tree structure and is one of the huge advantages of the NoteFrog™ method and its instantaneous search capability.
%important
%todo
%calendar
%action
%payment
%birthday
Tags may be placed anywhere within a note and can be scattered about or grouped on a single line:
%important %todo %calendar %action %payment %birthdayCreate any sort of tagging characters and scheme that serves your purpose. As you enter a tag (or mutiple tags followed by the "Enter" key) into the search box your matching notes will be only those that include the tags that you have thus far entered. Use as many or as few tags as you wish in any note. Notes that contain your tags are instantly available to you via the revolutionary NoteFrog™ search capability.
Basically, a template is just a normal note that you copy and then paste back in to be filled out and then saved as a new completed note. But as in almost every case, our little Frog guy/gal (we're still not sure which) makes the process fast, simple and flexible. Dang, she/he is good.
Whenever you want to use your address template just search for "address >template", which will probably isolate the address template by the time you get to the">". Then:
There are two ways of doing NoteFrog™ Clipboard Captures, one manual and the other an automatic "Clipboard Capture Mode" that you tell the Frog to operate in.
By turning on the NoteFrog™ ACC mode, the program will automatically "grab a copy" of everything you copy to the clipboard, no matter what source it comes from, and create a new note in your Active Stack for each individual copy that is made. It leaves the clipboard itself unchanged. NOTE: An option to gather captured text clips cumulatively into a single note will be available in a future NoteFrog™ release.
For example, a NoteFrog™ user might be collecting a lot of reference information about wart removal. She just Googles away in her browser, and every time she encounters an interesting fact about wart removal she simply highlights that information and copies it to the Windows clipboard. While in ACC mode, NoteFrog™ monitors the clipboard for any changes. It sees the new clip come in, grabs a copy, and makes a new note containing the clip content. As each new clip goes to the clipboard, the same grab a copy, make a new note process is repeated. If the user copies 20 wart information snippets, NoteFrog™ will have captured them all as 20 new notes in the Active Stack.
Many options controlling Clipboard Capture can be selected in the "Clipboard" tab of the "Options" menu at the top of the NoteFrog™ program window.
ACC mode itself can be toggled on/off by using the Options menu or by right-clicking on the tray icon and toggling ACC option in that menu. As a visual reminder, the tray icon will turn yellow whenever the program's ACC mode is activated.
Because of the way that the Windows clipboard operates, especially with Internet Explorer and Web pages, you will probably find the clipboard capture useful only for collecting text or individual images. It does not work well or at all on general formatted Web page content, only the text portion will be usable. However, that alone can be extremely useful when gathering reference material.
Your items go into stacks and stacks go into a Library. Shown below is a representation of a Library containing four stacks: three stacks of user items plus the NoteFrog™ Trash Stack. The number of stacks and the number of items within a stack are limited only by your hardware.
Except fot the Trash Stack, you may name stacks as you wish. In this example the user has named his stacks Personal, DayLog, and Business, they contain 850, 312 and 632 items respectively, and the Trash Stack contains 31 items. Notefrog maintains a trash stack of deleted items that may be recovered up until the time the user specifically empties the trash.
850 Items
312 Items
632 Items
For example, you might email the exported stack to your own webmail account as an attachment and then access it from any computer by viewing that email.
Note that the stack content is not currently encrypted, so you should not publish sensitive data online where non-authorized access could be possible.