Mega-indexing Made Easier with askSam

Contributed by Florian Gehrke

Reprinted with Permission

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Ten years ago, I acquired my first askSam (v.5.0 for DOS). Since then I have been working with all versions up to v.4i Pro, using askSam just the normal way as everybody does.

With AS4, for the first time, I produced a kind of "mega-index" or "file of files". This occurred to me looking at the many hypertext-features offered by askSam. This mega-file is just a collection of short abstracts pointing at all sorts of files, such as text, graphics, sound etc. It contains a short description, subject, date, origin etc., providing a central database, that is able to administer and to index all kinds of objects on my computer: text, fax, pictures, WAV-files - whatever the source application may be.

Connecting the index file with all these files by hypertext-links, I can open these files directly from askSam in their source application. Thus, in many cases I do not have to import all these objects into askSam. They are left to the application they where produced with. With this index askSam helps me to connect almost everything that is normally spread out all over the hard-disk and could not be brought into any connection at all. Additionally, it provides an index to applications, that have got no file-administration at all or just an insufficient one.

Florian Gehrke