And Where Was That? (FREE)

Often you must find one drawing in your archive, but all you know is a specific text you hope it contains. This add-in enables instant and easy search for you and your team.

Free

This add-in scans all drawings selected by the user, finds all the text inside drawings and indexes and saves that text information internally (or if selected, in the remote database). This solves the problem where a user needs to find a drawing in the archive but only knows the specific text he/she hopes the drawing contains. Thereafter, the user can perform an instant text search and the result will be the name of the file that contains the text, which can be directly opened and zoomed to the searched text.

Basic use:

drag and drop your archive folder and click "Scan/Update"
wait until the indexing process is finished (depending on file size, it takes anywhere between 0.1 to 10 seconds per file)
from now on, all of your archive files can be instantly searched by text keywords

Advanced use:

if your company has an MS SQL database server, and your archive folder is stored on NAS, then this Add-in will be able to store indexed text information in the MS SQL server and every user using this Add-in will have access to this information. In this case, only one user must scan the whole archive, and others can search once they are connected to the MS SQL server. This simplifies the whole process and makes it low-cost for large organizations since all users (but one) can have the free version of this add-in.

Free version limitations:

The only limitation is the maximum number of 50 drawings that can be added. There is no time limit, no search limit, but you can add or remove only 50 drawings. Please note that if you choose also to work with a remote MS SQL server, you can benefit from the fact that you can always search everything on already scanned drawings from NAS and MS SQL server without problems as long someone on the network has the full version.

This free version is intended for use in small companies, by individuals, students and others who do not have a large archive of drawings. It can be used in combination with the full app version. If you feel this is uncomfortable, please remove the free version and download The full version of 'And Where Was That?'