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Catalyzer can be used in many different ways; the following sections outline some possibilities - as a complement to spreadsheets; for file / image archiving, for web publishing. Visit the website www.axiope.com for more examples.
Spreadsheets are fine for small amounts of tabular data - but if you have lots of spreadsheet files, or you'd like to add cross links between worksheets, or you'd like to sift out particular subsets of data from multiple spreadsheets, or you'd like to publish a web database with information in the spreadsheet, Catalyzer is a lot more convenient.
You can highlight tables in the spreadsheet, and simply copy and paste them into Catalzyer. Catalyzer builds in a spreadsheet-like view, so you can edit data in a familiar tabular fashion. The power of Catalyzer is that you can have multiple tables arranged into folders / subfolders - combining the familiar benefits of the file system with tabular data. Other benefits of using Catalyzer include: built in web publishing, ability to search across all the data and better handling of links to data files / images.
Many groups generate large amounts of data, which they store on CDs or DVDs. The problem here is keeping track of all the data (which CD was that file on?) when the volume of data is too great to store it all on hard disk.
The Catalyzer solution is to create a catalog of each CD - you can do this by importing all the files. You can then add notes or annotations at the top level folder, perhaps a "CD Label", "Shelf number" and "Room number" so that when you search the catalog you'll be able to find the CD.
For all types of files, the catalog will contain basic information such as the filename, modification date and folder. For images, and data files for which an importer is available, the catalog will also contain thumbnail images. The advantage of creating catalogs is that the catalog files are very small compared to the total data size - so you can keep all the catalog files on hard disk even though the data is on CDs on the shelf. You can also search across catalogs (including by thuumbnail).
You can also create structured websites of your catalogs, so you can browse the thumbnails and the filename information to find which CD has the data you're looking for.
Currently there is a limit to the total number of records which can be stored in an individual catalog (of around 10,000 records), so you might choose to have one catalog for each experiment, but you can have as many catalogs as you like. Future versions of the Catalyzer Workgroup Server will allow seamless searching, browsing and merging across thousands of catalogs.
Many people find Catalyzer is flexible enough to use as an electronic lab book - recording experimental data directly into the computer at source (rather than writing down on paper and typing into a computer later).
The way this works is to set up structures - using folders and subfolders - and then set up the data entry form for each experiment. For example, you could make a form for a "Recording" with fields "date", "notes", "strain", "result", "link to data file", "link to protocol". Where entries have a restricted set of possibilities (e.g. a result could be "good" or "bad", a strain could be chosen from 10 different options), you can set up menus and choice buttons to make it simpler to enter information.
Catalyzer then gives you a customizable form for recording your information the way you choose. Once the information is in a catalog, you have access to all the standard search and browse features, and you can link directly to any associated data files rather than having to write down long filenames by hand. You can also include thumbnails of graphs or images, link directly to spreadsheets or data files, and build up a complete record of all the information relevant to the experiment. Of course most people will use an electronic lab notebook as complementary to their paper one rather than a replacement, for use with more structured data collection.
Many groups have important information which needs to be shared - such as details of stocks, samples, protocols, or contact details and bibliography information with links to PDF papers.
Web publishing is built into Catalyzer - once you have the information in a catalog, you can press a button and you have a website. So making a web database of stocks available to everyone in the group, which perhaps you currently have in a spreadsheet is simply a matter of copying / pasting the tables into Catalyzer and pressing Publish. It is also simple to migrate data from relational databases into Catalyzer for its superior flexibility and simplicity, either by exporting (in "CSV" format), or using the database import plugin.