Noteliner adds tables

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Jul 5, 2011 at 06:13 PM

Hi, Daly,

Glad to add some details. So far I’ve used Noteliner primarily as an outlining application and have not taken much advantage of its task- and day-management features, but as it continues to evolve I may begin to use it more fully.

As an outliner it is a nifty application because it just works seamlessly with my fingers on the keyboard. Type, hit enter to make a new note, tab to indent, shift-tab to out dent. Think only of the words and not the outliner. That’s how outliners should work. It’s how Noteliner does work. Of course it does way more than that. It provides a nice hoist feature—“focus” in Noteliner-talk. When your outlines start getting long, add bookmarks to make it fast and easy to get to various sections. It has a simple but effective export, either through the export command, or simply by highlighting and copying. So, when I just need to outline a writing project or brainstorm a plan, Noteliner is usually the tool I turn to.

As for specific applications, I use it for keeping notes of phone conversations I have with our marketing consultant. In addition to being easy to capture our thoughts while I’m on the phone, I can also use Noteliner’s STATUS feature to mark items that need follow-up.

I’ve also, off and on, been using Noteliner as my day journal. It is actually excellent for this, but my sense of CRIMP has kept me hopping around. Here’s how I would use it for the day journal: Create a note for the year, then a sub note for the month, and a sub-sub-note for the day. Put the focus on the day, and just write whatever notes you need. Notes that need followup can be marked as such and found quickly even days later. Check off items that are complete. Use the unique tagging feature (unique in how it is implemented) to categorize notes by project.

I haven’t been able to work tables into any kind of Noteliner workflow, because the implementation is in a beta version, with no backward compatibility with exisiting outlines. But I have been playing around with the table function and see that it could be really handy. The neat thing about it is that it is just an overlay. That is, you can view the notes on any page (page being Noteliner-talk for any set of notes that share a parent) as a table, then remove the table and your notes remain in the outline. I’m still learning the ins and outs of this feature.

I don’t know if that answered your questions or not. I wasn’t familiar with Planz (because I don’t have Windows 7 or Office 2007), but there is a similarity in some ways between the two. Planz appears to have a much more robust linking capability. Beyond that I can’t comment.

Steve