For many years I have been using the original (16-bit) version of Info Select. The time has now come for me to find a more modern utility, and I have been considering the free edition of AllMyNotes Organiser. Before I download the program, could I ask a couple of quick questions:

1. Will AMN be able to directly import my data from Info Select? If not, what would be the easiest way of transferring the data?

2. I think I saw somewhere that the free version does not support printing. Is that correct? If so, I don't mind buying the paid-for version, but it would be nice to know if that will be necessary.

I realise I can get the answers to these questions by downloading the software and experimenting with it, but if someone would kindly give me a quick reply to the above, it could save a bit of time. Thanks in advance.

Mike

Slightly surprised not to get an answer to these questions. I would have thought they were quite simple, especially the one about printing.

Not to worry. I haven't found time yet to experiment with AMN, but will do so soon, so will try to figure out these things for myself.

Mike

Please sorry for not answering on your post timely - somehow I got sidetracked once I saw your post...

"MikeL" wrote:1. Will AMN be able to directly import my data from Info Select? If not, what would be the easiest way of transferring the data?

Not directly but from Note-delimited and Tab-delimited text formats exported by InfoSelect. Not perfect, but as long as I know AllMyNotes is the only app on the market which can export from these file formats.

"MikeL" wrote:2. I think I saw somewhere that the free version does not support printing. Is that correct? If so, I don't mind buying the paid-for version, but it would be nice to know if that will be necessary.

Indeed, but seen we'll allow printing in free edition, I guess it will be good move to increase popularity for free edition.

Vlad,

Thanks for your reply. Don't worry about the delay. I can see you are doing a lot of work on developing and supporting this product, and I know it's easy to get distracted.

It's good to hear that you will be supporting printing in the free edition. I'm planning to move to the paid-for edition myself, but I'm sure others will welcome this move.

Regarding Info Select migration, I've made a few discoveries in the last few weeks, and I'll mention them here in case they are of benefit to others.

1. You are right when you say that IS can export to a text file, which can them be imported into AMN. But this does not preserve the formatting (fonts, colours, etc) in the IS notes. My version of IS does not support other export formats.

2. Recent versions of IS can import from early versions, but again the formatting is lost. If you can live without the formatting, you could import your notes into the latest IS, then drag them from there to AMN (but you would have to drag them one at a time, which might be tedious). Another issue is that you have no control over the titles of the imported notes. IS will simply set the first line as the title, which might be unsatisfactory if the first line contains, say, a date stamp.

3. Since neither of the above solutions would work for me (because of the need to preserve the formatting), I decided to write a little program to do the job. My program reads an IS "deck" (a WD file), and converts it to HTML. Each note becomes a separate HTML file. I then open the Windows folder that contains the HTML files, multi-select them, and drag them all at once into AMN. This is quick and easy. By using HTML tags for fonts, colours, etc., I can preserve the formatting. And, since AMN takes the HTML filename as the title of the note, I have complete control over these titles. The only snag is that AMN doesn't respect the original order of the notes. I can sort the notes by, say, Creation Date, but that only applies to new notes, not to those you have imported.

I hope the above will be of interest to anyone else who wants to migrate from Info Select to All My Notes. Keep in mind that my experience is based on using very early versions of IS (in particular, the 16-bit versions). There might be easier ways of dealing with the later versions (for example, by using RTF as an intermediate format, which I didn't try).

Mike