Re: how do you import grandview outlines into microsoft word

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2939

Posted by 100341.2151
2005-03-10 22:40:05

Steve -

> Just to add a little extra oomph to your decision to buy.

Every piece of advice helps a lot! Although I am a GrandView enthusiast, I have to recognize that it does have some gliches. Here are some GV deficiencies I find particularly irksome, together with comments on how Brainstorm seems to handle the problem in question:

1. Not being a touch-typist, I often don’t look at the screen until I have typed quite a lot of text. All too often I find I have typed a sentence or two in caps, and there is no way in GV to change blocks of text back to lower case other than to re-type everything. (Of course, one could cut-and-paste to another program, make the changes, and cut-and-paste back again, but this is hardly efficient). In Brainstorm one can change the letter-case of marked text.

2. GV backs up files to the same drive as that on which its outline is located. It is not possible to back up files to a different drive. I don’t think Brainstorm allows this either. Having just had a hard disk failure, I am increasingly looking for this facility in programs. (Both programs have “autosave”, but that addresses a different issue.) Of course, I could use an external backup program like Second Copy to back up on to CD-RW…

3. There is no way of telling how far into a GV outline one is - i.e., no vertical scroll-bar, no line numbers, etc. This can be a problem when trying to navigate long outlines, or to reorganize them. Brainstorm’s aerial view does provide such a bird’s-eye picture, although I would rather be able to expand the whole Brainstorm outline from within the editing view and navigate by means of a vertical scroll-bar, rather than have it located in a separate read-only view.

3. GV’s internal “clipboard” seems to have a drastic bug - it only clips a limited amount of information. I am not sure if this is because it has its own definite internal limits (e.g., 64k, perhaps); or because the limit is variable and determined by the size(s) of the outlines opened (i.e., a memory problem); or both. On one or two occasions it has lost me a lot of work, as the program’s warning comes only after you have “cut” the text in question, and by then the work is already lost. (The answer, of course, is to use “copy” and not “cut” with the internal clipboard - or, if working in Windows, to use the Windows clipboard, instead.) Brainstorm does not have this problem.

I am hopeful that there will be synergy in using both programs together, so I have decided to register Brainstorm.

Derek

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