Organize Your Internet Research: A Simple (Paperless) Solution

If your life is anything like that of the average office professional, the chances are good that you get your information from a wide variety of sources on any given day, and for any given project. Keeping all of that information organized in one place is one of your major daily challenges, no doubt. If this were non-digital world, you would probably just do that by printing your research and keeping it all in a notebook - one nice, neat binder for each project to make life sane again. But this is the digital world and paper is quickly becoming a thing of the past!

You might remember a recent article about Microsoft's program, OneNote, a digital notebook for organizing information from various sources. But if you're not interested in purchasing a new piece of software, I found a way for you to get notebook capabilities and circumvent the cost at the same time. Who loves you baby?

So, how are we going to do this? With a piece of freeware of course! For those of you who are unfamiliar with the concept, this is a piece of software that the developer has chosen to give away to end users at no cost. However, this should not be confused with open-source software, which may also be free but allows you access to the source code for modification as well. I know I've been talking a lot about plug-ins recently, but this is not a plug-in. This little baby is a full-fledged, stand-alone piece of software.

The piece of software I'm referring to is called Internet Research Scout and it comes to us from a company called Byte Scout. It allows you to take snippets from websites and other online sources, even direct code, and make them into one single digital notebook so that all the information is kept together for your convenience.

Sounds cool, doesn't it? You want to know what's even cooler? You're not tied to Internet Explorer. For those of you who are in the growing group of Firefox fans, you will find that this software is fully operational with your web browser. The one downside is that those of you who are tied to a Vista operating system, will be unable to join the party, at least for now. The current version only works for Windows 98/XP/Me/2000.

In addition, if for some reason your job acquires you to make references or bibliography reports (for example, if you work in academics or in the medical profession) this program will even do it for you. Don't worry; an executive software guru put together the program so it comes with several video tutorials that will help you become familiar with the basics. You can access by them clicking on the name of your browser below.

Enjoy your newfound productivity and organization!

Tutorial: Internet Explorer

Tutorial: Firefox