How an Add-on Saved a Student Untold Hours

This is the actual hand Rami uses to click his mouse and save text to files.

Rami Khader is pursuing a Master’s degree in Information Technology Management at Regis University. This endeavor involves exhaustive research and writing. Early in his studies, Rami encountered a clear need when it came to organizing and recalling online literature reviews for his various papers and thesis.

At the start of any research project, Rami says he reviews at least 30 other papers related to his subject. But only small, scattered portions of any paper bear relation to his own topic. “My issue was—I needed a quick tool to copy a summary of text I found, and then add a data time stamp and URL reference so I could return back to the website,” explains Rami. “I was doing this manually and it consumed lots of time.”

Then he found Save Text to File, an add-on that saves selected text and its metadata to a directory file with one simple right-click of the mouse.

“This was exactly what I was looking for,” says Rami. “For each chapter of my thesis I have a file full of summarized text and URLs of the papers that I can quickly access and remember what each page and paper was about. I have my own annotated bibliography that’s ready to be formatted and added to my papers.”

Very cool. Thanks for sharing your add-ons story with us, Rami!

If you, kind reader, use add-ons in interesting ways and want to share your experience, please email us at editor@mozilla.com with “my story” in the subject line.