Categorize your documents and access them quickly with Documan

Do you work with a lot of documents, but struggle at times to find the ones you need? Documan is a freeware tool that can be used to categorize your files, and access them quickly. The program is user-friendly, and you can get started with it in just a couple of minutes.

Documan isn't portable, and it displays a splash screen for a few seconds when you run it, which sadly you can't disable. The application starts with zero categories by default, so you'll need to create one. Click on the "Add new category" button, and a box will pop-up where you can give it a name. Choose something relevant like Work, Finance, Personal, or anything else you come up with, it's up to you.

Once you have added a category, it appears as an option in the "Category" drop-down menu. Categories are the tags that I mentioned earlier, so the next thing you have to do is assign the category to something. Click on the add Document button, and a browse window will pop-up. Use it to select the documents.  Technically, Documan is not restricted to documents, it can be used to categorize any file, but there are some limitations when you choose a non-document file (like an EXE or ZIP, etc). I'll explain why you may not want to do so, in a bit.

When you've added some documents to a category, you can access them quickly using the "Files" drop-down menu. This is very useful, since you don't have to sift through a directory or drive that's full of documents. Select a file from the menu, and it will open in its default handler, e.g. TXT in Notepad, DocX in Word, and so on and so forth.

You can however open some document formats directly using Documan, it supports PDF, DOC, DOCX and HTML files. The program comes with its own Rich Text Editor called Multicode, also from the same developer. This is the limitation that I mentioned earlier, if you try to open a non-supported format, the program will not open it. That said, you can still use the drop-down menu to access the other files. The Find option lets you search for files by their number or string and lists the result in a pop-up window, it can also look inside documents for the search term.

Documan comes with two more tools. You can use the program to encrypt and decrypt documents. To secure your files, you'll need to set up a password from the program's settings. The option is identical to the Data Protect tool which is a dedicated program from the same developer that allows you to encrypt files, and both tools use a 256-bit AES encryption algorithm.

The other option which you can access from the Documan menu, is Convert PDF to DOC. Unlike the other utility, this one isn't an offline tool, and instead opens a webpage called freepdfconvert.com. It can be handy if you want to edit the document with a third-party software, but I would rather not upload a document to an online service to convert it.

Documan is a freeware application. The developer recently made all of their premium software freeware. That's the reason why the interface reads has the word "Pro" in it. Some UI elements are in German, but it's not too difficult to figure it out.

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