Re: GrandView Categories & Assignments

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 4617

Posted by 100341.2151
2005-11-21 19:23:53

Steve -

Yes, I’ve been using it for the entire writing process in relation to lectures for years; and I can see how categories and assignments would work well for managing a project such as the one you mentioned.

What I was wondering about, though, was using categories and assignments in the writing process itself. From what I can see there are two basic ways of assigning headlines (i.e. outline items) to categories in GV.

One is the “binsort” way: here, you create “named” categories (either existing headlines (items) or ones specially created for the sorting process), and then “send” other headlines to the named one. This process takes place in the outline view and actually reorganizes the outline itself by letting you throw items around - somewhat as one can do in Brainstorm, too. Items moved to the named headlines take up their place as subheads of the named headline.

The other way is where you create categories and assign items to them without disturbing the outline itself. Single items can be assigned to multiple categories (as in Zoot), and assignments can be viewed either at the bottom of the outlining window, and/or in a separate “categories” view. The items retain their link to their categories however much they are moved around the outline.

Although it looks as though this latter feature could be tangentally useful to the outlining process - e.g. for noting items that could use additional work on them, or for which citations are needed (two purposes from off the top of my head) - I can’t yet see other potential uses. For example, important aspects of the writing process like assigning items to an appropriate place in the argument are already taken care of by the outlining process itself. There would therefore be little point in developing a set of categories (Chap 1, Chap 2, etc) that essentially did the same.

This is not a criticism of GrandView, of course, since the categories/assignments feature is intended as a part of the PIM/project management aspect of GrandView, rather than the outlining one.

Derek

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