DEVONthink for Mac

DEVONthink (DT) is a Mac application for managing and organizing information and documents, including text and multimedia. It is designed to help manage the resources we collect for research or personal use. 

Based on a built-in database structure and Artificial Intelligence (AI) engine, DT supports the following features:

• importing documents, including PDFs, Words, RTFs, images, and videos;
• grouping them based on tags, metadata, file types, and terms manually and automatically;
• adding annotations to documents and taking notes;
• creating textual concordance through indexing and weighting based on term frequency;
• linking related and relevant documents in each database;
• searching full-text content, tags, metadata, and other identifiable information.

This Guide is intended to be introductory and covers some basic features and functionality of DEVONthink (based on Version 3.9.2).

For more detailed and advanced features, refer to the DEVONthink documentation. The DEVONtechnologies Blog is another helpful resource to update you on DEVONthink features and usage.

In this Guide, we use several shorthand versions of the terminology.  The following is a list of shorthands we utilize in this Guide.

• DEVONthink -> DT or DT3
• Microsoft Document File -> .docx
• OpenDocument Text File -> .odt
• Rich Text File -> .rtf
• Plain Text File -> .txt
• OpenDocument Text File -> .odt
• Microsoft Excel File -> .xlsx
• Microsoft PowerPoint File -> .pptx
• Artificial Intelligence -> AI

This Guide is based on the work that Austin Dancer, Graduate Assistant, has completed during the Spring and Summer of 2023.