Mind if I list some useful stuff that made me use mendeley instead of bibtex:

1) it can export the whole library as bibtex

2) right click over your paper -> "copy citation as tex" -> paste it into your latex file.

3) keep the PDF together with the metadata

4) anotate the PDF

5) search those annotations

6) put DOI, PMID, ARXIVID -> get all metadata from the interwebs

7) organize it with keywords, collections

I can't believe it's better to keep a text file edited by hand than to use an user interface that automates several things. "Better", at least, in the saving-time-and-not-getting-mad sense.

what about

PRINT CHR$(4) + "CATALOG"

to invoke it from BASIC? ahh, the days.

That was the most useful comment of all till now. Please, mod it up!

The patent is about the method of diagnosis of a certain genetic condition using the mentioned gene. Couldn't find the reference yet, only Wikipedia.

(submitter again)

Thanks; that's exactly my point. Or, sometimes I need to get that data and validate it - by making a pivot table. Isnt't easier if I just do everything in the same UI?

(disclaimer: I know OLAP, Pentaho, Mondrian and it's all good things - except if you need to do an one time analysis! I don't want to spend hours setting up cubes and everything for something that will be made once and never again! That's why I use spreadsheets.)

(submitter here)

Yes, I end up doing this once in a while. I also use R, Perl, PHP, or even bash to process some data. However, in some cases it is handy to have a view of the data while you're processing it.

For instance, suppose you need to run a regexp function over the 12nd column of a matrix; usually I save data as a CSV, cat file.csv | perl -ne '@a=split/,/; $tmp = $a[11]; .... ' > new_file.csv, load the new CSV, check for errors, debug, repeat... sometimes is just a one-time task I need to do.

What if you install that on a virtual machine? Or, does the license allows the user to do that?