Grandview to Inspiration

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 1994

Posted by bartoletti
2004-07-02 16:45:17

My only basis for offering this review of an outline software is that I was an early Thinktank user, then Grandview user. Googling around I found Outliners.com, and Steve Cohenís old posting on how to convert old Grandview files to Inspiration (way back on 6/3/2003 -Iíll repeat at the end to save you hunting.) Inspiration is the ìupgradeî from GV that I have been looking for.

I read the discussion on Notemap vs Inspiration but have not tried Notemap. However, Inspriation is so much cheaper - I found mine through Pricegrabber.com for $60 delivered. Thatís below the cost that someone was complaining about paying for Notemapís upgrade.

My Review:
The Tech Support for Inspiration is refreshingly responsive. While I part with my beloved GV, it is such a relief to upgrade to a living windows-integrated program. The ability to cut/paste to other windows programs with standard ctrl x,c,v commands; to have filenames longer than 8 characters; to enjoy Print Preview; to have multiple undo, etc. Because it handles website names as hot links, Iíve set up all my links on an Inspiration outline rather than fuss with windowís ìFavorites.î

I have been working on an outline easily over 2000 lines that I originally did in GV and have now converted to Inspiration. So far, everything I used in GV I have found in Inspiration. E.g. ìPromote Subheadingsî and ìDemote Rest,î are under the Outline menu simply called Promote and Demote. Command names are different - like to print a portion of your outline, you must ìFocus Inî under the View menu— like GVís ìhoist.î It will print only what is expanded which is nice, so if you want the whole document, be sure to go to View, Show Levels, and key in something like 99 (like we did in GV to fully expand).

I donít see a mark&gather but Tech support suggests trying their Collect and Move; Tech support also acknowledges they donít have a ìcloneî but due to my inquiry are now considering it (I used it only rarely - not critical for me).

Inspiration can export an outline to a doc file that MSWord can open in its Outline Format (as if you would EVER want to use MSWordís miserable outline feature).

The Downside: My only complaint is that on my large file, two commands are so painfully slow that they interrupt my thinking. It takes several seconds to save my large file and resume work on it; and the command to Split a headline takes several seconds. Itís not a problem on smaller files—and I guess itís because Inspiration was designed foremost as a circle-diagram brainstorming program, and the outline program is a flip-side off that design.

Incidentally, I also tried Mindmanager because it syncs to my Palm (I see in the Discussions that Inspiration now does Palm -gotta try that next). Mindmanager’s check-boxes turned my Palm into a handy checklist (Inspiration has check boxes too - so maybe it can now do this now). But Mindmanager is seriously limited on import and export. I had to convert my GV to Inspiration, export to MSWord, then import in MSWord format - through which all notes were converted to headlines. Then when I went to re-export to MSWord, Mindmanager failed with large files.

In short, I have just converted all of my old working GV files to Inspiration. For the price, itís the upgrade for which I was looking.

REPEATING FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE: Steve Cohenís instructions on how to change GV to Inspiration (with two tips added):
In GV:
1. change labeling to ìIndentation with no labelsî
2. Expand the outline (View, Expand to, 99) Caution: if the outline has two or more top-level headlines, be sure to expand each one—or, create a new top level headline and demote your previously multi-top-level headlines, then expand the new single top level headline).
3. Highlight (Mark) the entire outline. Easy way: Crtl Home to upper corner, then F6 start block, Crtl End to end of file. Then export using ìParagraphî option.
4. add ì.txtî as the file extension.
5. In Inspiration, open the .txt. file—no need to import nor convert, Inspiration automatically converts it from txt to its own .isp format.

The outline format is well preserved - 99%. A few headlines were split; or converted to a note; some empty notes were created; in only one case out of hundreds of lines was a headline promoted for no apparent reason. But most important - I donít think I lost any data.

Goodby old friend—I loved GV. but itís time to move on.
(Now if only Chandler will fulfill my addiction to Lotus Agenda.;-)

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