Re: how do you import grandview outlines into microsoft word

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 2947

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-03-11 14:05:15

>I think this—the abstraction and the absence of most visual elements that one expects from programs nowadays- is probably the single most important reason for Brainstorm’s small user base.- Alex

Not sure I agree. I think there are a lot of people who don’t like the graphical elements, as in this excrept from a discussion about outliners and learning disabilities, which I quote at length because it makes a point I have tried to make:

>Many people think that if a person seems visually gifted everything put in front of him or her has to be graphical but my personal experience and my experience working with students is different from this.

>I think those who know me would classify me as having visual strengths. Yes, I find that the graphical organizer in Inspiration gets in my way. I demo it to groups but for my own thinking and writing, I use Omni Outliner which is a simple outliner with no graphical component.

>Why?

>Not because of the clutter of Inspiration’s tools (and I agree, Inspiration’s UI is visually cluttered) but because I can see my ideas in list form more easily.

>Granted, I’m a stronger word decoder than many of the people you’re talking about here and personally I’d never use pictures in the graphical outliner in Inspiration.

>What’s my point?

>There’s more to “visual” than icons.

>Visual is also about relative place and a text-based outliner is also a visual tool in that it allows one to construct a visual hierarchy.

>Almost all outliners allow collapsing and expanding of sub-topics (hiding and showing by double-clicking on the parent topic) and this too, while not iconic is visual: it is visually hiding detail that might get in the way of thinking.

>I’ve been using outliners for a long time and other tools have come and gone but outliners remain one of the mainstays of my software toolkit.

>ThinkTank, Acta, More, Inspiration, AppleWorks, MS Word, Omni Outliner, and many others I’m sure.

>So, “visual” can be about more than graphical representation of ideas; it can also be how ideas sit spatially.—Richard Wanderman (http://snipurl.com/ddka)

Anyway, my alternative theory about Brainstorm’s small base is that it is a difficult program. It is one of those programs that is relatively hard to learn, but easy to use once you learn it. Not *very* hard to learn, for sure, but too hard for most users, because the conventions are different and the mental operation of thinking of a topic embedded in a structure when you aren’t viewing the structure requires a level of Piagetian object constancy, if you will, that many people haven’t attained or feel uncomfortable thinking with.

Stephen Diamond

Back to archived message list