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More on Linux (so okay, not strictly relevant to outlining - perhaps)
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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 30, 2013 at 06:10 PM
Franz Grieser wrote:
>Mindview as a hierarchical spreadsheet? I used it a few years ago as a
>tool for presentations and mind maps. Would you mind elaborating on how
>you use it as a spreadsheet? And why Mindview and not LibreOffice Calc?
Strictly speaking, MindView is a ‘classic’ mind mapping program. However, it allows one to add custom fields to nodes, and then perform calculations on those fields along the hierarchy.
So when I plan a project, I can simply make the work breakdown and add budget and resources on the actual tasks/deliverables. The advantage of this approach over any spreadsheet is that I can start with the info I have, and add detail along the way; i.e. if a task needs to be broken down into sub-tasks, all I need to do is add the subtask nodes and set the task resources as the sum of its subsidiaries.
I recently finished the financial reporting of a project. My starting point was the project mind map which I created two years ago. Along the way I have added detail, and now the finances are calculated directly from nodes that represent individual invoices—with the actual invoices as linked PDFs. If I am not interested in that detail, I just hide that level with one click.
I am sure it can all be done with a classic spreadsheet, but I find this far more convenient and less error-prone. In a spreadsheet, the formulas are hidden and you have to check them one by one. In a tree/mindmap structure, the formulas are visible—they are represented by the tree structure itself. Of course, the complexity of formulas you can create in a ‘real’ spreadsheet is far greater, but I don’t need that.
The first time I encountered this feature was in B-liner and at the time I loved it. But B-liner couldn’t export the calculation structure, which meant that I then had to re-do the budgets in Excel to share it with others. MindView exports to nicely formatted Excel. Note that I am still using MindView v.3 (it has recently reached version 5) which works fine in Windows 7 and I see no reason to upgrade.
I find it quite intriguing that the vast majority of outliners that we discuss here have no such customisable fields and, of those that do, very few can actually do calculations on them. In fact, I can only think of Natara Bonsai (but it only allows one custom numeric field); don’t know about MyInfo. It really seems like a lost opportunity. I have included it in the features of my ideal outliner http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/17338
I remember that, years ago, Freemind was developing ‘attributes’, i.e. custom metadata per node, including numerical fields. At the time I lost interest in Freemind because betas where taking forever and I found the custom field functionality quite awkward. I don’t know if the functionality ever made it to the stable release, nor whether it was ported to Freeplane, which I use for simple mind maps. I will check it out and report back.
Posted by Franz Grieser
Jan 30, 2013 at 07:53 PM
Thanks, Alex.
That makes it clearer. If it weren’t for the price of the Business edition ... ;-)
Franz
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Jan 30, 2013 at 08:41 PM
Apparently, the feature is available in Freeplane as well http://freeplane.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Formulas though it’s not so user-friendly. It seems quite powerful though.
For me this is great news, because it means that I can take this activity to Linux too and for free. Worth learning the Freeplane formula markup. The only issue is that, like B-liner, it will probably not export to Excel. However, since the program is free, anyone I want to share with can install it.
Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
May 11, 2013 at 08:14 AM
MadaboutDana wrote:
>So it was with great pleasure that I recently installed the latest
>version of Xubuntu (12.10) on a rather nice Asus 1101 netbook I’ve had
>for a couple of years. [...] And lo! I now have a nice, speedy
>little netbook with an operating system that is actually pretty much
>state-of-the-art. It boots in around 40 seconds, runs very quickly,
>loads e.g. LibreOffice, Basket NotePads (despite the latter’s KDE
>libraries), Google Chrome, Thunderbird very fast, runs Dropbox, and
>links very nicely to my local WebDAV servers. What a little gem!
Anyone interested in trying out a lightweight Linux might want to take a look at Voyager Linux http://voyager.legtux.org/ It is a customisation of Xubuntu with a great choice of software. It would take one ages to find all those programs.
>There are some interesting shortcomings: there’s no Google Drive or
>SkyDrive clients (although there are workarounds for both).
Can you share a tip or two on the workarounds? I have found the following, which I’ve used in Windows in the past:
http://storagemadeeasy.com/?p=static&page=LinuxDrive
>And just to keep this topic very vaguely relevant to the forum, you
>might want to check out the very pleasant CherryTree, which is a
>cross-platform dual-pane outliner.
There are some interesting outliners and information managers in Linux that don’t exist in Windows, e.g. like Semantik which is a mind mapper of sorts developed for working on long texts. Unfortunately, for me, cross-platform compatibility is something I hereon more or less require from such software.
Posted by Dr Andus
May 8, 2018 at 09:33 PM
@Alexander,
I wonder how your Linux experiment is going.
Seeing Google’s announcement today (in a nutshell, Chromebooks will be able to run Linux apps directly within Chrome OS, without the need for any special workarounds, as currently is the case), there is a chance I might develop an unhealthy interest in outliner tools on Linux in the foreseable future ;-)
https://www.blog.google/products/chromebooks/linux-on-chromebooks/