Shape-based outline vs. text-based outline, which is better?

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Posted by Taxi
Apr 20, 2010 at 04:37 AM

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.)?

Posted by Edwin Yip
Apr 20, 2010 at 02:49 PM

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

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