Clones? Cross-referencing?

Posted by 22111
Oct 7, 2013 at 12:37 PM

It goes without saying that within your file system (physical as well as on your pc), the problem is similar: You have grouped reference material, be them reference material from the beginning or just old projects from which parts then (should) become reference material for new projects, and again and again, only sub-groups of files (and then, of content within those files) will “apply”, when other content or other files within those sub-groups / sub-folders will not be relevant. The only conceptual difference to what is within your outliner is the possibility, in your outliner, to better fine-grain those different contents, meaning you cut them up into more pieces, in order to make one bit apply and another one not, when in files, there will be more disparate content, in most cases, than in one outliner item (ideally).

Technically, to replicate such “sub-groups of originally connected items” on the file system level, is possible even if you try to do it all within the file system, for example by .lnk files, but perhaps there is a real interest instead of doing it by database links, which means by a document management solution but which should have such “gathering” functionality for fast building up new compounds from spread, “old”/standard data.

For physical files, some makers offer “thin folders”, which at first sight, is a very good idea to better realize such multiple combinations, but then, most things do have some “natural context”, in which it’s very handy to “have it all together” in sort of a “standard combination”, from which you deviate only scarcely, depending on the respective context, and this invalidates this “thin folder paradigm” (I’m not speaking of separate customer files here, of course, but of files to be combined in order to be useful).

So we have a disruption from physical files to pc, but it seems that except for real expensive software, our pc tools don’t make enough advantage of their additional possibilities-over-paper yet.

I once considered cloning a real paradigm shift, and it is, considering paper files, photocopies, and such, but their current technical realization is too cumbersome yet in order to become really helpful for “project work”, which is NOT about “putting fome file into several categories” only, but which is of partial combinations of single items, and of sub-groups of “connected” items, in endless variants, so I hope some ideas above, or additional ideas posted here, could find their way in some outliner or another.