Any Advice On Tools For Researching? - Info Collection, Distilling Reports, Managing Knowledge

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Advice knowledge Market research Recommandation reports software

New answer on Jul 14, 2020

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moltenso asked on Jul 12, 2020

Dear Friends @preplounge, I am curious about what everybody is using in daily work to deal with researching incl. collection info, distilling insight in reports and managing knowledge.

Large part of my work involves researching on industries and individual companies. I am using basic onenote/word/ppt/folders for such work. Organising my findings in notes, saving the reports/websites and searching based on what I have found has always been a pain.

Anybody has similar pains? Could you please share your experience and tools you use to manage this in consulting business?

Thank you so much!

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Answer 1

Best answer

Clara

Expert

Content Creator

replied on Jul 13, 2020

McKinsey | Awarded professor at Master in Management @ IE | MBA at MIT |+180 students coached | Integrated FIT Guide aut

Hello!

I am a control freak and I love One Note, since it has a very good search tool that helps you very quickly find info.

Furthermore, it lets you attach files and also make levels and sub-levels to keep it all in order.

Hope it helps!

Cheers,

Clara

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moltenso on Jul 14, 2020

Hi Clara, thank you for the tips! yes I also find oneNote quite helpful. However, when it comes to cross-link the notes I took to get an overview of a topic or to synthesize, the sub-level folder style of organizing my knowledge can be very limited. could be that this is just a personal need of me...

Answer 2

Robert

Expert

Content Creator

replied on Jul 13, 2020

McKinsey offers w/o final round interviews - 100% risk-free - 10+ years MBB coaching experience - Multiple book author

Hi there,

Altogether I am using 4 main tools - whereas the central one is the simple Microsoft OneNote. Got used to that, not sure if there are better ones outside - but with some plugins for automatically generating table of contents out of headers, and symbols which can be compiled over various notebooks and sections, it's everything I need to organize.

Otherwise I am using a standardized folder structure for each study to save documents.

In addition, Mindjet MindManager is a great tool to collect ideas/research/etc. and organize them (and both folders and MindManager files you can link back to my "central" OneNote.

On top of that, I use Google Keep with my standardized tags - just helps me to easily come back to some website sources later, nothing more than that.

Hope this helps - if so, please be so kind and give it a thumbs-up with the green upvote button!

Robert

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moltenso on Jul 14, 2020

thanks Robert! this is helpful!

Answer 3

Anonymous replied on Jul 14, 2020

Dear A,

I find very useful Notion. It may include everything you need. BTW it's free for personal use.

Best,
André

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Answer 4

Francesco

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Content Creator

replied on Jul 13, 2020

#1 Coach for Sessions (4.000+) | 1.500+ 5-Star Reviews | Proven Success (➡ InterviewOffers.com) | Ex BCG | 10Y+ Coaching

Hi Moltenso,

I am not sure I understood your question, what exactly do you find painful in using word, ppt and folders to organize your work? This would help to provide better answers.

Best,

Francesco

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moltenso on Jul 14, 2020

Hi Francesco, what i mean is: while word/ppt/oneNote is good for gathering the research information (e.g. market, trends, specific company, etc.), when it comes to cross-link the notes I took to get an overview of a topic or to synthesize, those basic tools can be very limited. i have to either run through the notes I took in different occasions or search in the 1000 folders for some reports I read last week. could be that this is just a personal need of me..

Any Advice On Tools For Researching? - Info Collection, Distilling Reports, Managing Knowledge

Overview of answers

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