Dossier: The Smart Way to Get Organized

I’m sure all of us deal with a fair share of documents. In the past couple of years, a lot of innovation has helped us move our document creation, storage, backup and sharing to the cloud. And in particular, there has never been a better time to collaborate extensively on a document with your peers. That’s all fine and dandy. But what about the documents we have on our hard disks?

Rummaging through folders in Finder and searching for them using Spotlight are by far the best options in front of us. I found Dossier when searching for a better way to organize all my documents. This wonderful app helps you organize all the information as you would like and easily share with others. Come, let us take it for a spin.

Getting Started

Dossier lets you intelligently organize information based on rules that you define – track recent changes, specific keywords in your text, and more. Post installation, you can either add your existing documents to Dossier or create a new document from the app itself. I was a bit curious with the option to create a document with Dossier and decided to proceed with that option.

User Interface

Actually, it is a root folder that is created in the app, when you go with the document creation option. The user interface isn’t mind blowing, but even at first glance, the app looks intuitive and simple to use.

Major organizational parts of the interface are flexible and Dossier allows you to view your information however you’d like – choose between vertical or horizontal panes, independently hide or show parts of the interface, or use the simplified editor window to focus on editing.

You can have multiple windows of the app running at the same time by clicking on Add a new viewer window. Not many apps come with this awesome feature, but it might be very helpful if you are trying to stay on top of multiple documents or folders at the same time.

Creating and Managing Documents

Dossier comes with a notepad editor. It’s a WYSIWYG editor and comes with the oft used features like text alignment, lists, bullets, formatting options and the like. It should be more than enough to whip up a quick document on the go without having to install or open a separate document editor.

What good is a document organizer if it doesn’t support folders? With Dossier you can create as many folders as you want to cut the clutter. The app supports nested folders as well. Meaning, you can create subfolders within a parent folder and there is no limit to that as well.

The explorer pane to the left does a very good job keeping the folder structure intact. However, if you are using a MacBook and the trackpad, you might want to deselect the current folder choice to create new parent folders. Else, you might end up creating a bunch of sub folders.

For those having a bunch of folders and don’t have the time to find a document by clicking on each and every folder, the Unified Entries option will be of immense help. When you click on Unified Entries, the app will list all the documents stored, irrespective of the folder structure.

Importing Documents

I tried importing a bunch of document formats – doc, rtf, txt etc. and Dossier added them to the respective folders in a few seconds. Once imported, you can move the documents around by dragging and dropping them into folders of your choice.

Unfortunately, the app didn’t understand the document properties well. All imported documents showed that they were created today (but they weren’t). This is a big deal because, you won’t be able to use the calendar feature to the max. Ideally, each document should carry the date of creation and you should be able to access them by choosing a date in the calendar. But, when you create documents from within the app, this feature works perfectly fine.

Dossier is excels at search too. Documents are auto suggested as you start typing in the search box and I found the search results to be very accurate. On a similar note, documents created and stored inside Dossier are accessible to search from Spotlight too.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Dossier does an impressive job organizing data. Did I mention that Dossier come with a solid encryption system? So, you can lock away your data with a flexible encryption system that allows you to encrypt individual entries or folders. Now you can rest easy when carrying important personal or business documents on your MacBook.

At $24.99, Dossier isn’t exactly very cheap and the user interface isn’t very attractive. That being said, if you are someone who handles a large volume of documents, definitely go for Dossier as it will do most of the heavy lifting for you.