Re: In defence of Word (5.1, anyway)

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 264

Posted by camusdvo
1999-08-27 12:20:59

This will sound strange, particularly since I learned technography from Bernie. I really tried using Word but have failed. Yes, I agree, the best way to use word’s outliner is to define the keystrokes. But there’s so much other work to be done…

Pray tell, how can this assertion make sense:
“they work best when you’re not actually in outline view”.
I want to outline in outliner mode…
I sort of understand the comment, because I often revert to outline view to navigate through a huge document. But that still does not make me use the outlining functions per se.

The levels of outlines can effectively be useful. But since you can have a grandchild without his/her father, this means you can be organising your thoughts ALL OVER the map. One, this reduces rigour in what you are doing (I’ve learned internally that structure is key. Even in cases where I would like my same ‘leader characteristics’ to be associated with a certain type of information, but what is generated is off by one level or so, I am forced to conform and find an organisation -> that rigour is, well, priceless, IMHO). Otherwise, you literally need a meta-level of thinking to keep each different level’s meaning active. That’s too much on my brain when I am working, let alone sharing my thoughts with someone else.

Frankly, most of these plusses are really negatives to me. It boggles my mind why the folks at MS haven’t talked to Dave over all these years to get their functionalities just right. Make it workable in outline mode (structure, hot keys) and keep the family tree unmutable.

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