DotRational Indexer (for Windows XP and Vista) enables you to map and retrieve your files with your own keywords. It supports the preview and retrieval of image, audio, video, Word and Acrobat documents and enables you to view/edit ExiF and ID3 files tags. It offers a lightning-fast and flexible way of organising your project, office, pastime or hobby files, reducing mouse-clicks to retrieve what you’re seeking. 30-day trial version available.

Software that supports the retrieval of images with user-defined keywords is familiar. DotRational Indexer builds on this by supporting a range of different files, including AVI, BMP, DOC, GIF, JPG/JPEG, MP3, MPEG, PDF, PNG, RTF, SWF, TIF, WAV, WMA and WMV file formats, with appropriate media-playback in situ. The inclusion of Microsoft Word DOC files and Adobe Acrobat PDF files here is at the heart of what Indexer does, allowing document previews, page scrolling and navigation as well as preview zooming. It even supports text-searching in these two document files. This enables users to track down files accurately before opening them in their parent application.

Because Indexer supports this range of file formats, it’s an application ideally suited to the management of project-based file sets. “Find all files (any format) related to the London office + client X” works just as well as “Find all holiday photographs taken in Italy that include Cathy”. You can also attach free-text comments to individual files and then search across a whole index for specific text.

As well as excelling at file-retrieval, Indexer provides various other functions, including:
- generating printable reports (with or without thumbnail images) which can also be saved to PDF format with bookmarks and thumbnails included
- viewing, editing and searching for matching contents of ExiF image or ID3 audio headers

All this is available even if you don’t have Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat/Reader installed.