Hi,

This question is a little hard to describe for, so let's see the screenshots below, the first one is the "text-based outline" I call and the second one is how it look like after applying the visual style (each node in the outline looks like a shape), some told me that the shape-based outline looks a little cluttered, some else seem like it, what do you think?

Thanks in advance for your comments.

Text-based-outline:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/367923/file-hosting/wo/screenshots/beta2/projectinbox.png

Shape-based outline:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/367923/file-hosting/wo/screenshots/newoutlinevisualstyle.png

---
Edwin Yip
Turn MS Word into a full-featured outliner software
http://WritingOutliner.com

Edwin,

I get a page saying that the page I'm looking for can't be found when I click on either of those links.

Steve

Sorry, the links are broken, please try these:

Text-based-outline:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/367923/file-hosting/wo/screenshots/beta2/project%20inbox.png

Shape-based outline:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/367923/file-hosting/wo/screenshots/new%20outline%20visual%20style.png

Hi Edwin.

I prefer the "text-based" look. The "shape-based" style looks nicer but adds more noise to the screen.

Franz

The text-based outline looks a lot better and is more readable IMHO. If your goal is to enhance readability rather than purposeless visual pizazz, you might consider shading the background of every second line of the text-based outline with a very light shade of color.

That said, the shape-based outline looks more like how Word 2010 does things.

-- Chris

Thanks for the comments, and honestly I didn't expect you don't like the graphical visual style as opposed to me, maybe because I'm a visual guy....

---
Edwin Yip
Turn MS Word into a full-featured outliner software
http://WritingOutliner.com

I agree with Chris to the letter. The shapes mostly just add clutter. They do help me read across, to know which icons are attached to which item, but that could be done much less obtrusively by lightly shading every other row, as Chris suggests.
Cheers,
David

Thank you all for the comments! I've added an option for choosing the visual style by the user.

I'm glad I have asked the question, it's true that "customers think different" ;)

Edwin, you may find that we are not so typical customers; as far as I know most of us have grown up using text based outliners and many of us still do. I think that Grandview is still considered the closest to the holy grail of outliners by most people here.

That said, I also prefer the text approach as least cluttered, even though I tend to appreciate more visually attractive approaches in order to use in presentations. I think that both versions would benefit from icons being smaller (about the size of a capital letter) and/or more spacing between the rows.

Hi Alexander,

I appreciate your comments, using smaller icons and larger line spacing are really good ideas, I'll definitely try it! Thank you.

--
Edwin Yip
Writing Outliner for Word- Turn MS Word into a full-featured outliner software
http://WritingOutliner.com

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Edwin, you may find that we are not so typical customers; as far as I know most of us have
grown up using text based outliners and many of us still do. I think that Grandview is
still considered the closest to the holy grail of outliners by most people
here.

That said, I also prefer the text approach as least cluttered, even though I
tend to appreciate more visually attractive approaches in order to use in
presentations. I think that both versions would benefit from icons being smaller
(about the size of a capital letter) and/or more spacing between the rows.

Edwin, I tend to agree with you that "the new visual style makes the hierarchical relationships of the documents more prominent".

The ability to quickly review the overall shape of a report is very important to me and anything that improves the prominence of the hierarchical structure would be a big help in this respect.

I am currently using different font sizes and colours for the outline heading levels in MSWord, which works quite well for the available 9 outline levels but frustratingly, isn't refected in the Document Map! However, with no limit on the number of levels, it's not easy to envisage a colour scheme that would make the hierarchical relationships of the documents even more prominent.

However, I would agree that more might be done with the background colour of the shapes to emphasize the structure. I find that when working with very long lists, it helps to highlight only evey fourth line rather than every second line. But I'm not sure if there would be sufficent sibling documents in my reports to justify this! What I wouldn't want to see is every second (or fourth) line given a very light shade of color WITHOUT regard to the outline structure!

Finally, I do wonder if it's really necessary to show the MSWord Icon for every document. Perhaps, you could just use icons to indicate the main sections, (Inbox, Research Folder, Notes, etc.)?

Hi Taxi,

Thank you very much for the input!

Regarding the icons, you are right, it seems the shown a Word icon for each document node is a little distractive, I'll hide them by default, and offer an option to enable it, thanks!

--
Edwin Yip
Writing Outliner for Word- Turn MS Word into a full-featured outliner software
http://WritingOutliner.com