Re: 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: 3686

Posted by srdiamond15
2005-08-09 12:36:38

>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.<

A nice feature in Word, absent from NoteMap is the ability to switch between a view with formatting and one without. But NoteMap _can_ easily give you a view without formatting, since it is easy enough to set the default as the same for all levels.

(It occurs to me, however, that NoteMap could very easily provide this kind of switching. It would simply need to retain two default sets of settings add a toggle. Maybe I’ll send this suggestion to CaseSoft.)

One observation about Word. Much of its development occurred before Microsoft became so dominant a company.MS’s attitude was different then, in that it developed fairly complex programs, unlike, say, OneNote, which is a paragon of simplicity. Appealing to a more select group of users, MS’s programs once were less concerned with being usable to everyone. NoteMap is maybe what Word’s outliner would have been had it been developed much later. CaseSoft markets to lawyers who find Word’s outlining confusing. And toggling between states is, I would think, potentially confusing to the average user, making my suggestion perhaps less palatable. (“Hey, I lost my formatting. What a terrible bug. Now I have to format it all once again. How many unbillable hours will that cost me?) The result is that NoteMap, although a much better outliner than Word’s, isn’t better in every respect.)

Stephen Diamond

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