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Re: NoteMap vs Word
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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.
Outliners.com Message ID: 3739
Posted by 100341.2151
2005-08-11 17:17:24
Graham -
Have you given the outlining features of NotaBene a trial run? When I initially started using NB I found them rather clunky to use. I was only a novice user at the time, however, and don’t think I gave its outlining features a fair trial. What has your experience been?
(Incidentally, I am still tempted to upgrade to V8 beta of NB - if only to show my support :-).)
As I think I mentioned in an old post, I came up against a rare file-saving problem with NB and, as a consequence, switched to a NoteMap+MS-Word combo. Then I came up against the “merging Comments” problem with NoteMap, and ended up finishing the contract I was working on at the time using just MS-Word.
Word’s outliner is, as you say, pretty basic, but it works quite well as what one might call a stage 3 outliner (stage 1 being brainstorming; stage 2 being structuring, developing and detailing an argument or set of arguments; and stage 3 being the final reorganizing and polishing of a draft). Standalone outlining programs seem to be best at stages 1 & 2, while stage 3 often requires an integrated word-processor/outliner like Word, WordPerfect or NB.
Word’s outliner works well enough for stage 3 purposes - i.e., for moving paragraphs around, promoting or demoting passages, sorting out the miscellaneous formatting problems that always seem to arise from using (or misusing) Word’s templates…and so on. I particularly liked being able to move passages quickly and easily around together with their associated footnotes. In this sense Word offers a very useful stage 3 outliner, although a pain to use for the earlier stages. I suspect that this is also where NB’s outlining is strongest.
Having to come to grips with Word gave me a lot more appreciation for it. I had previously nursed a rather unreasoning prejudice against it, partly because I found its implementation of the “template” concept so counter-intuitive. But once one gets that right, then everything else - outliner, document map - work properly and make moving around in, and changing, documents very easy.
Derek