Forum Posts Feed
ConnectedText vs. Scrivener
< Next Topic | Back to topic list | Previous Topic >
Posted by MadaboutDana
Mar 7, 2012 at 10:45 AM
Hi Steve, sorry, spending most of my time “lurking” on this forum (too much to do, too little time to do it), but saw your post and thought I’d share experiences. I’m working on precisely the same scenario - hundreds of pages of info that needs to be condensed down into four short-ish brochures. I’ve messed about with innumerable tools, but the best one by far is OneNote, because you can use it as a kind of giant pasteboard, chopping bits and pieces around, dropping them on different pages etc. You can also have more than one window open, meaning that if you’ve got multiple monitors, you can have multiple different “pages” (pasteboards) open and shunt information between them.
My only criticism of OneNote is the rather clunky search mechanism, but it’s an amazingly powerful tool for rebuilding text.
I should note that I don’t usually end up writing the final result in OneNote - I use either Word, LibreOffice or, if I’m presenting a structured idea to the client, TreeSheets (which generates rather nice web pages).
May be helpful!
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by MadaboutDana
Mar 7, 2012 at 10:47 AM
Suddenly realised you may be working on a Mac - but in that case there’s a wonderful free, OneNote-like tool available the name of which I’ve unfortunately forgotten! It’s been mentioned in the forum before - can anybody else remember what it’s called?
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 7, 2012 at 12:24 PM
Hi, Bill,
I think you’re referring to Growly Notes, which appears modeled after OneNote, though without a lot of the bells and whistles.
A question about OneNote—how do you merge your collection of notes on a OneNote page into one document? I’ve never tried to do this (I use OneNote at work). I usually just output the whole page as a PDF or web page. Is there a facility to merge notes into a Word document?
Thanks for the suggestion.
Steve Z.
MadaboutDana wrote:
>Suddenly realised you may be working on a Mac - but in that case there’s a wonderful
>free, OneNote-like tool available the name of which I’ve unfortunately forgotten!
>It’s been mentioned in the forum before - can anybody else remember what it’s called?
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 7, 2012 at 01:58 PM
Re Bill’s comment about OneNote: Tinderbox would also be very good for this manual, visual sort.
And, as an update, I called my Apple dealer and asked about upgrading memory in my MacBook. He actually convinced me that RAM was not the problem with slow VMWare Fusion performance—as my MacBook came with 4 gigs of RAM. He said that MacBook Pros don’t have very powerful processors. He did suggest I might be able to tweak the settings for Fusion to improve things a bit.
Steve Z.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Mar 7, 2012 at 03:44 PM
Yup, that’s the one - Growly Notes! True, fewer bells and whistles, but very nice effort (and free!).
Actually, OneNote allows you to “Save as” a Word file (as well as a few other formats) - you can select either the single page, or the whole section, or the entire notebook. Which could be handy if you want to use OneNote as a pasteboard and gradually build up the structure on various pages, then output directly to Word.
As an example of my working method: for the last brochure I wrote, first I added a page for my detailed notes (followed by a series of subpages for individual headings) to a OneNote section. Then I added a second page (plus subpages) to the same section so I could write the actual draft. Instead of tabbing painfully between pages, I simply opened a second OneNote window so I could work on this second “set” of pages/subpages alongside the first set (of pages/subpages) containing my detailed notes. Surprisingly enough, OneNote is actually quite resource-efficient (something that can’t be said for Word), so opening a second (or even a third and fourth) window doesn’t have a significant impact on system resources.
Once I had finished my draft, I set up a template in Word and after copying bits and pieces of draft text from OneNote, pasted them (as text) into the Word template, revising and tweaking as I did so (I prefer this rather archaic process, because I use it as an editing stage). I could equally easily have generated a Word document and then worked in a second Word document alongside it, but I tend to leave fragments of text scattered around on my OneNote pages in a pattern that means something to me (and sometimes includes arrows, comments, highlights etc.), so copying and pasting actually suits me better - after using OneNote as a pasteboard, I use Word as the tidy container for the final output, as it were.
But you may find a completely different way of working that suits you. What’s gradually convinced me of the merits of OneNote is its remarkable flexibility!
Cheers,
Bill