Re: Ecco over-rated?

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 1813

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-01-23 11:35:29

I began by reading a lot of the back issues of Easy Ecco Newsletters and started learning about some of the programs finer points. I discovered that the real key to working with Ecco was making use of Columns to help “slice and dice” data in all manner of ways. By using columns along with filtering you can do all sorts of tricks that may not be apparent at first such as hoisting (or a facsimile of) and gathering. You can also have an item belong to mutiple parent folders and achieve a non-linear data structure that comes close to the pseudo nueral network type structures that The Brain is capable of.

There are a lot of other interesting features, like Forms and multiple views, that are too numerous for me to go into right now but suffice to say that Ecco is a very powerfull program with benefits that are not readily visible untill you really spend some time with it.
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I’m familiar with the use of columns from InControl and Fair Witness/InfoDepot on the Mac, in days of old. I see what you mean, but personally I’d prefer an outliner that actually implements hoisting and so on without requiring a workaround, plus has columns. This is promised in version 3 of ADM. I have been hesitant to embrace ADM because I’m not convinced its marketing is effective enough to ensure longevity, but that wouldn’t both you, if you are prepared to port your data to an unsupported program.

I am currently in the proccess of porting over all of my data from Info Select to Ecco and trying different data managment scenarios out to see if it will fit my needs. So far so good.

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