Woodworker's Guide

If you often find yourself hunting through back issues of your woodworking magazines to find a certain article, Woodworker's Guide is just what the doctor ordered. It allows you to search an index of 26 woodworking magazines using one or more article title keywords. The index covers most of the popular woodworking magazines - approximately 30,000 articles from hundreds issues. (Only the article titles are in the index, not the actual articles).

A 450 page printed version of the index, "The Guide to Woodworking Plans and Techniques", is also available. According to the vendor, the intent is to update both the online and printed versions of the index on at least a yearly basis.

NOTE: The last update appears to be December 2004, making the long-term viability of the product a bit questionable. The web site also doesn't appear to contain fresh content.

I put Woodworker's Guide through its paces and was pleased with the results. The index is divided into 37 categories such as "joinery" and "jigs and fixtures". You just select the category or categories of interest (its quite easy to select any or all categories), type in the search keywords, and a nicely formatted results screen is presented that lists the title of each pertinent article, the magazine name, the issue #, and the page number. You can even get fancy with the search syntax, using phrases like "router-bit" to only retrieve titles dealing with routers but not router bits.

Woodworker's Guide provides a periodical filter that allows you to restrict your search to specific magazines and issues. If, for instance, you only have access to Fine Woodworking magazine beginning with issue 90, it's convenient to only view results applicable to those issues. The operation of the periodical filter may seem a bit unusual at first - the main screen disappears and the filter screen appears after a delay of several seconds - but you quickly get used to it. Fortunately, the settings for the periodical filter are saved automatically so the next time you run Woodworker's Guide, there's no need to redo the filtering.

Abstracts are available for some of the magazine articles in the database. These are denoted by an asterisk next to them in the search results screen - you just click on the article name and the abstract is displayed. This is a very nice feature that I would'nt mind seeing expanded upon in future releases.

Another nice feature in Woodworker's Guide is the tool review index. It enables searching for tool review articles since 1995 using tool type, manufacturer, or model number as the search criteria. This is just the ticket for all those folks that are always trying to track down tool reviews on the Internet (and you know who you are).

As for how this product could be improved, my only suggestion is to add online help to assist users in understanding the use of the search keyword operators and the periodical filter. Fortunately, the hardcopy documentation is excellent and covers all program usage topics in detail.

Bottom line: Woodworker's Guide is intuitive and very useful for tracking down woodworking articles. The authors spent 2 years developing Woodworker's Guide, including beta testing and incorporation of a 3rd party woodworking magazine index, and the results of their efforts are evident in the quality of the finished product. Hats off to them!