Re: How to enter notes

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 4547

Posted by stephenz
2005-11-04 08:55:34

> And my main consideration: Do you split your notes into separate items, or do you simply enter all the notes from e.g. a meeting into one item? The advantage of the first approach is of course that you can categorise much more precisely (indeed, a sensible categorisation may be quite impossible if including all the notes from a meeting in one item, as many different issues could be discussed - the same goes for notes from e.g. a book.).

Two applications come to mind that might be of interest. Both allow you to keep the integrity of a list of notes from a meeting or a class, while giving you the ability to classify individual pieces of those notes. The first is OneNote. It has the ability to add to any individual paragraph a “flag,” which is essentially a category. It comes with pre-defined flags for “to do” and “important” among others, but also gives you the ability to build your own catalog of flags.

The other option is The Journal (http://www.davidrm.com). The Journal is not strictly a database, but a collection of documents that you can organize in a set of tree hierarchies. It provides the ability to select any text and assign a “topic” to it. This allows you to review all topical information across all your notes/documents. You can only assign one topic to any selected text.

Anyway, just a couple of other ways that some programs deal with this issue. They are not perfect solutions, but it is nice to see some creative thinking out there.

Steve Z.

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