Exploring DEVONthink’s Education Templates: Cornell Notes and Source Material Spreadsheets

DEVONthink’s education templates give historians two practical ways to turn reading and research into structured, searchable knowledge: Cornell Notes templates for deep engagement with a single text, and “source spreadsheets” for building flexible lists of primary/secondary materials (articles, books, booklets, manuals, proceedings, technical reports, theses, and related references).

The Cornell Notes templates are designed around a study workflow that starts with an essential question and ends with recall prompts. Templates live in DEVONthink’s education subfolder, accessible via Actions → New from Template (or the top menu’s Data → New from Template). Four Cornell variants appear: two “area of interest” versions and two “education” versions (the education-labeled files include course context in the name). Each variant comes in both rich text and Markdown formats. The rich text version behaves like an unformatted document, while Markdown produces a cleaner, visually structured layout.

Using the Markdown Cornell Notes template, users take notes while listening to lectures or reading. The template then reflects the essential question and note content in a preview. A key feature is the side-by-side view: the left side holds the essential question (or keywords), while the right side holds the notes. After filling in the notes, users write guiding questions/keywords that support synthesis and later recall—then they can print, fold, and study using the classic Cornell method. For example, a filled-out course template auto-populates student name, date, and period/year fields, and includes a week-by-week structure. One example lecture theme—“What is Calamity physics?”—is captured as the essential question, followed by a summary of what the lecture taught and how the concept is defined.

The second template set shifts from note-taking to cataloging. The source spreadsheets are tailored by source type: articles include fields like title, author, journal, volume, year, pages, and notes; books swap journal fields for publisher and ISBN; theses add institution name. A built-in form view makes data entry faster than typing directly into rows. The templates also highlight customization needs that come with real-world citation data. For instance, the “pages” column expects a single numeric value (like total page count) by default, so users must edit the column type to “single line text” to store page ranges such as “265 to 288.” Similarly, the “month” field can be converted to a single-line text column with dropdown options (January–December) or seasonal categories (spring/summer/fall/winter) to match how journals report publication timing.

Despite being flexible, these spreadsheets are not positioned as full citation managers: they don’t generate complete formatted citations automatically. Instead, they function as a lightweight database inside DEVONthink—ideal for remembering which sources came first, tracking what’s in the office versus at home, and maintaining lists for grants, reading plans, libraries, or “brag files.” Users can further organize by adding tags, adding columns like “location,” and sorting to keep materials grouped by topic or where they’re stored. Overall, the templates aim to reduce friction in historians’ workflows while encouraging customization to match individual research habits.