Viewing, searching and sorting annotations

One of the key benefits of A.nnotate is that it lets you build up an annotated online library of documents and web snapshots, with an index of the important terms and pages. This guide explains the various ways you can view and search your annotations.

Finding the latest changes - the documents index

The documents list shows all documents in your account with the most recently changed one at the top. For each document it also shows how many notes there are and the author, text and time of the last annotation so you can quickly find out what is new.

The controls at the top list the documents by date; alphabetically by name; or grouped by tags.

You can also filter and search the list to show only a subset of documents. The first box shows all the tags in use for documents, and the second one all the viewers. Clicking a tag or a name causes only the matching documents to be shown. Clicking it again reverts to showing all documents.

The 'Find' box lets you enter a search term, and it filters the list as you type.

The notes index

If you have several documents under review at one time, it may be easier to use the notes index, shown alongside.

This shows all annotations on your documents. Notes can be ordered by date (most recent first), subject, tags and document name. All tags are listed; click on a tag to show only the matching notes. The search box can be used to find particular words in the text of a note; the list of matching notes will be show below as you type.

Initially it only shows the first line of a note, but you can expand it to view the whole note by clicking the subject text. A preview of the page that the note is on is also shown, with the target text underlined.

To go to the note on the document itself, just click on the document title in the note display or on the preview page.

Notes on a single document

As well as letting you jump from page to page in the document, the navigation bar also links to a note index for just the current document; click on the 'index' link on the right hand side.

The index shows all the notes and replies for the document and again, can be sorted and filtered. You can read and reply to notes in the index view itself as well as on the document. For example as an annotation is processed, you can add a reply and tag it as "done" or "postponed" etc as appropriate.

Accessing notes while viewing a document

The last button on the bottom row of the document controls opens the on-page index view.

Here you can sort the notes for the whole document (not just the current page) by clicking on the column headings. Clicking on a row takes you to the right page in the document and highlights that note ready to edit it or add a reply.