Zoot Power (was Mind Raider)

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 3871

Posted by stephenz
2005-08-24 16:08:12

> Could someone provide an example of a powerful Zoot exotic tool and what about the way Zoot presents it that makes it obscure to the new user?

I’m not sure you will consider this exotic, but here goes an example of how Zoot gives me peace of mind:

I receive e-mail orders from customers. When one of these comes in, I open the message, then click on the Zooter tattoo (residing like a friend in the upper right hand corner of the screen) and select the “clip to” feature. A listing of my Zoot databases opens and I select my “Journal” database; the text from the message is copied into a Zoot item. After reviewing my e-mail, I close out and go to Zoot, the new order is waiting for me. If I am unable to place the order at that moment, I assign a reminder time to pop up later in the day, so I can book the order then. After I book the order, I return to Zoot, click the “complete” check box and the item is filtered from my view, but, thanks to a smart folder I set up to capture anything to do with that customer, I can find it for future reference.

Here’s another example: Say you’ve got a Word file with information about all of your products. It might look like this:

Product: Widget 1

Price: $40

Order #: ABC-222

Product: Widget 2

Price: $50

Order #: ABC-333

Say you’ve got 200 products listed like this. You can import this file into Zoot, and set “Product:” as the item delimiter, which means Zoot will create a new item whenever it sees that text string. So now you have your Product list broken down into 200 separate Zoot items. Here’s the cool part: Highlight the word “Price:”, drag it onto the grid column bar and Zoot creates a column to show the price of each product. It automatically recognizes that text string in each item and displays the price in the item grid.

Another example: Folder columns allow you to create pick lists in your item grid, which also create smart folders that display only the items that have specific list items selected. For instance, I keep track of all my vendor transactions in a Zoot database. Everytime I place an order or approve an invoice, I create a new item. I have several folder columns in this database, so that I can tab to the “Vendor” column and select the appropriate vendor from the pick list, or, if this is my first transaction with a vendor, just type in a new name, and Zoot automatically creates a smart folder for that vendor. I then click over to the folder column for products, and do the same—some transactions involve more than one product, so I made this a multi-pick column and can assign several products to this item. Later on, if I want to see all the transactions for a specific product, I just click on the smart folder for that product and there they all are. If I want to see all transactions with a specific vendor, just click on that folder… there they are.

This just skims the surface of the many things Zoot can do, and I uncover features I hadn’t known about before all the time. I’m not sure if this wows you or not—maybe you’re going to tell me IDEA does all this and more. Zoot is definitely my most useful piece of software, hands down.

Steve Z.

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