Re: PIM/Outliner/Database Solution for Legal Study

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 1974

Posted by srdiamond15
2004-06-24 23:54:26

I’m an attorney who has been to law school in the last decade, so I know something of the demands.

You strong outlining and data base capabilities, with both internal and external linking. This makes your choice easy, because there are few Windows programs that fit. There are some excellent databases and a few decent outliners, but the intersect is really limited to two programs, Microsoft OneNote and ADM. OneNote does not (yet)have internal hyperlinks, and its outliner is barely adequate. If I were doing law school today, I’d go with ADM. (http://www.adm21.com)

You really should have version 3 of adm, which is still in beta, although a final release is ready. You can ask the developer, Eric Sommer, if he’ll let you demo version 3, which has columns and other metadata support lacking in version 2.

You can link Word Perfect docs to adm (I think), but you won’t get all of the advantages you would have with Word 2003. I’d say it’s time to make the switch. Although the law market for word processors is pretty evenly divided, that won’t remain the true for long, as Word Perfect falls further behind. As one who has always relied on outlining, I have long felt Word Perfect’s greatest weakness—the one feature in Word it cannot apparently emulate—is the absence of an outline _view_ of a regular document. Today it is mostly the older dinosaurs who are stuck on Word Perfect. The rest of us use Word.

Let us know what you decide and how it works out.

srdiamond

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