Off Topic - Software that can tag paragraphs

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 17, 2011 at 07:48 PM

DaXiong wrote:
>I’m having the people I’m helping write in a spreadsheet.
>Each row is a paragraph of text, with the 1st column of
>the raw its topic tags, and the second column the actual paragraph.

I would expect some of the writer oriented tools to be able to provide such a functionality; then again, I don’t expect them to handle collaborative writing very well.

Here’s my take; I believe that some information management software discussed here is more suitable for providing alternative views of textual content. However, information management software is usually not particularly suited for writing.

- Surfulater has two alternative trees for organising information: a usual folder organisation and a tag tree view. Note: it is basically a single-user program; I don’t know how well it fares when a knowledge base is shared among several users.

- Evernote relies much more on tagging, as otherwise information can be filed only in notebooks and stacks of notebooks (two levels and that’s it). The Windows version now allows shared notebooks which is a great feature. The basic version, which should be good enough, is free.

- Working with Excel, you might want to take a look at the XL Notes plugin http://xlnotes.com/ which allows for long rich text notes in Excel

- Citavi is, as far as I know, the only software that will show you “stacked up, scrolling previews of whichever items you multiselect”; see this discussion for more: http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/2414/5

By the way, how do you share the spreadsheet among your collaborators? Have you tried Google Cloud Connect?