Browsing and exploring vs. searching

Often in litigation, investigations and research you can feel there is an important underlying relationship but you can't put your finger on it. Since you don't know what you are looking for you can't do a regular database search. In such situations you'll know what you're looking for when you see it and so you need to be able to browse and explore information and relationships.

Browsing lets you quickly review information you might not have thought to examine or would have missed in search. Exploring, on the other hand, is for when you need to follow relationships and your thoughts, while keeping intermediate results available from which to explore alternate paths.

However, the synergy and effortless freedom to fluidly move between browsing, exploring and searching, needs to be experienced to fully appreciate. This section explains MasterFile's "Explore" tool and then takes you through a small exploration/browsing session to let you experience this.