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Case Study
– Judy Koren, Information Professional |
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Business Background |
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Judy Koren is an independent information professional with a
wide range of clients: industry, especially high-tech firms;
government ministries and organizations; and academics. She uses
several different vendors, in addition to web-based databases
and the public Internet. She does a lot of post-processing of
the information, and typically e-mails her clients a zipped
archive containing the final report, linked to the the documents
upon which it is based. |
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The Problems: |
1. The need to collate results in many different formats
The source documents could be anything: plain text from an
online database; html documents; Word, Excel, PowerPoint files;
various graphics formats; and of course a large number of PDF
files. Short excerpts from all these types of file needed to be
incorporated into the report, with a link to a saved copy of the
full document.
2. Writing a search report was too labor-intensive
Judy was spending too much time manually saving documents and
multimedia files and adding hyperlinks to the Word report; too
much time on routine cut-and-paste and highlighting operations;
too much time organizing and keeping track of the many files
that a singe search could produce; too much time altogether.
3. There’s just so much that Word can do…
Many web-based information sources make it hard to select or
save text: for instance, by providing diagrams in formats that
are not generally supported, such as TIFF; by burying text in
tables within tables within tables, or by the “innovative” use
of hidden frames and layers. Word doesn’t cope too well with
material copied from such sources. It was both frustrating and
time-consuming to tell Word to convert a table to text (perhaps
several times for the same piece of text), or to link to
information that really should have been in the report itself;
or to bring up a saved presentation in PowerPoint in order to
copy one slide out of it and transfer it as an image to Word.
4. There are just too many versions of Word
Since Judy could never be sure what version of Office a
particular client had, she had to send the results in RTF
format. This severely limited the amount of pictorial
information she could include in the search report itself: RTF
files that include pictures quickly grow to sizes that are
difficult to send by e-mail.
In short: Judy felt that the tools at her disposal were too
limiting. She was looking for a tool that would work the way she
wanted, rather than forcing her to adapt herself to the tool. |
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The Solution: Net Snippets |
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Since Judy runs her own business as an independent information
specialist, she doesn’t usually need to collaborate with others
on projects. She decided on the Professional version, without a
server license. |
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The Results |
1. Professional, organized reports in an open-source format
Judy doesn’t use Word for reports any more. Net Snippets does
far more for her. It makes organization of the material for the
final report a breeze. She can decide not to include some of the
saved materials in the report, without having to actually delete
them or move them to a different folder. Outlines, tables of
contents, bibliography? It’s all automatic. And the report is an
HTML file: any browser will open it.
2. Easy capturing of any type of information
Net Snippets captures individual selections of anything – text
selections, individual pictures, partial screenshots – from any
file format. Judy no longer has to worry about how the material
will look in the final report, or whether she can put it in
there at all. Sites that make life difficult are a breeze – Net
Snippets’ selective screen capture function doesn’t even notice
the document’s underlying structure.
3. The source information is saved automatically
Judy no longer has to worry about remembering to document her
sources manually. And if she decides she’d prefer a longer or a
different selection from a document, one click from the snippet
she did save will take her back to the source to change her
mind.
4. Collecting, highlighting and annotating the information is
done “on the fly”
Everything is part of one streamlined process. And because each
excerpt from a document is a separate snippet, Judy doesn’t have
to waste time and energy finding one paragraph in a large
document, nor organize them relative to each other until she’s
ready to prepare the final report.
5. Communication with clients
Net Snippets’ “Prepare for Delivery” function wraps the final
report and all the original documents Judy wants to send her
client into one of several different types of compressed
archive, and saves it to disk or emails it to her client with
one click. She no longer has to bother with huge RTF files or
wonder what version of Office her client has. |
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Unforeseen bonuses: |
1. You’ve got a friend
The company is not only willing but eager to hear suggestions
for improvements to their product that would help Judy increase
productivity even further, or solve any problems she meets in
the course of her work.2. Easy learning curve
Because the program is so intuitive, and the documentation so
clear, Judy was up and running within a few minutes of
installing Net Snippets.
“I class Net Snippets as a ‘microwave application’”, Judy
summarizes. “Meaning that before you start to use it, you don’t
really see why it’ll be better than what you already have; but a
month after you’ve started to use it, you don’t understand how
you ever managed without.” |
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