NoteMap vs Word

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 3685

Posted by pma
2005-08-09 12:06:34

I completely agree with you on the appaulability (if such a word exists!) of Word. I was VERY happy when I discovered that this “underground world” of outliners existed. That there are indeed alternatives to Word. Outlining is SUCH an important part of an effective way of working with knowledge and ideas, that it would be a pity leaving that part of it to Word.

I guess that it depends a little on where in the process you make the shift from the info gathering/sorting stage, to writing. If this shift is done late, you probably don’t need so much outlining facilities, (as you need less to move things around) and maybe don’t need other than the outliner and word.

The best would, of course, be if ALL the work, from start to finish, could be done in an outline. But for me, this isn’t an option, as I need the integration of Word with Reference Manager for my in-text citations. And Word (as many other word processors) also has many other nice features, that I wouldn’t like living without.

Back to NoteMap: What I didn’t like about it was actually that I like to have the plainest, simplest outline view, without formatting, fonts and other things. I like the outline to be “pure” mind. A little like the ideal of HTML-coding, (or rather HGML). I think that OPML outliner could move in that direction, when/if it gets more mature. E.g. actually when I upgraded to TreePad Business from the lite version, I found it annoying that the formatting came along, when I pasted something from another document. (Of course, I quickly realised that I should use Shift-Ctrl-V).

-Peter.

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