Data grid views, or columns

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 5246

Posted by stephenz
2006-02-14 10:46:07

> while WB and TBW let you fill blank “dumb” columns. In fact, I find them pretty useless, certainly because I don’t have the need to organize things in columns in my writing process.

Sebastien,

My initial re-action to programs like Writer’s Blocks was the same; that is, that they were pretty useless. However, I’ve become intrigued with the notion more and more lately, triggered by my happy discovery of Notebox Disorganizer.

In the little google ads that appear at the top of this site, Writer’s Blocks refers to itself as the “Visual Outliner.” I think this is inaccurate, because the power of an outline resides in its ability to create multiple levels. By its nature, columnar data provides only two categorizations (columns and rows), unless you want to include the ability to categorize by color.

Nevertheless, organizing information into columns (or grid, might be a better term) can provide a useful view of your notes and has at least a couple of advantages over standard two-pane outliners. For one, it makes it possible to view the contents (or partial contents) of several items at once. For another, when you add row-labels it allows two-dimensional categorization of your information—not always useful or important, but when it is, it can be quite powerful. For instance, this can be quite useful when you can break down a project into categories (the columns) and each of the categories require the same pieces of information (the rows). A good example would be a SWOT analysis for a marketing project. Another might be a list of chapters (columns) in which you want to keep notes about plot action, character development, timeline, etc. In this way, the rows of the table act as templates.

Anyway, I’m still trying to figure out the ways in which programs like Writer’s Blocks, Text Block Writer and Notebox can be harnessed. By the way, the developer of Liquid Story Binder is planning to add grid functionality, which could be interesting, depending upon how well integrated it is.

And, finally, I agree that Super Note Card is, in fact, in a different classification than Writer’s Blocks, etc. It has a lot of additional functions and really doesn’t include columns, per se.

Steve Z.

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