A variation on the software roll call. Perhaps it gives a different view of people's use of outliners. What are your top 3 (outliner, PIM, writing, note-taking) tools right now? Do they form a toolchain (fit in a workflow)? They don't need to be ranked.

I realise the answers will depend on the type of task you tend to work on these days, so the context would be helpful.

I am mostly doing academic writing right now, which requires me 1) to refer to notes, 2) create a final outline, 3) write the draft, while referring to 1 and 2. For these steps I use, respectively:

1) ConnectedText - for storage, analysis and recall of notes. Easy to find them, link to them, annotate them.

2) Freeplane - after not seeing the point of mind mappers for many years, Freeplane emerged as my surprise fave outliner! I don't really see any major difference between mind mapping and outlining, other than it is a more spacious view. But perhaps it's just my use, as I try to emulate an outliner as closely as possible (starting node on the left, all child notes to the right).

3) Outline 4D (StoryView) - again, a bit of a surprise, as I thought I'd be doing the final writing in Scrivener or in Word. But there are just so many visualisation options for reverse outlining and comprehending a large and growing piece of text (20k words at the moment), provided by the single-pane structure and the multiple document interface.

P.S. The idea for this poll was to really restrict ourselves to the top 3 tools (and no more :)

1) PDF Revu. I spent several frustrating years trying to find a good PDF mark-up tool. Now that I've found it, it has truly changed the way I work. When I have to do a job I often try to organize it so I can make maximum use of Revu just because I know things will go better that way. I use it at work all day nearly every day.

2) Ecco Pro. I can't leave out my old friend. I've tried dozens of PIM's but have never left Ecco Pro. I use it for any kind of writing and note-taking.

3) Swift To-Do. I love the clean interface. If only we can get a little more control over columns it'll be on the same level as Ecco Pro.

(1) I'm working on a book right now and am taking notes in Evernote, mainly because the OCR is convenient and the software lends itself to quick-and-dirty notes. I suspect that I need that kind of approach, because I tend to take notes that are super-neat, and I fear that they may become almost an end in themselves.

(2) I'm also working on another big project (a book eventually, I hope), and for that I'm using MyInfo, which has been my favorite note-taker for years. It's beautiful on the screen (see my comment about neatness above), it has a nice UI, and it is easy to organize material. Its major shortcoming is that it is Windows only and hence not available on mobile devices.

(3) I've just begun using Documents by Readdle on my iPad. It's an excellent file organizer and a solid reader of PDF (and other) documents. When I download a PDF of, for example, a book, I need to look through it carefully, marking it up as I go. Then I turn to Evernote or MyInfo for the actual note-taking.

Bill

Hm, tricky one. Okay, but it's going to be slightly artificial, 'cos I use loads of different apps/progs depending on what I'm doing. But this is a recent "workflow" that has been something of a revelation. Outlining doesn't figure prominently - except it kind of does:

Intro: when I get a new document to translate, clearly I'm going to want to refer to lots of reference material (previous translations, either by me or somebody else). One way is to use a CAT (computer-assisted translation) tool, but these don't deal well with that trickiest of formats, PDF (extracting coherent text from PDFs is difficult, even for specialised apps). So what I do now is:

1) Download/dig out the PDFs I want to refer to (annual reports, brochures, press releases etc.), in the two languages (I usually translate from German into English). Then use PDF Split & Merge Basic (open-source) to "interleave" the German/English reference docs so page 1 of the German (source) text is followed by page 1 of the English (target) text, page 2 by page 2, and so on. PDF Split & Merge Basic generates a neatly interleaved document in about 10 seconds and saves it out as a new file.

2) Use PDF-Xchange Viewer to modify the document properties of the new file so that it automatically opens in "Two-Page Scrolling" view. This means the interleaved German and English pages are displayed neatly side by side, so you can immediately see how the texts relate to each other, regardless of where they're positioned on the page.

I prepare all my PDF reference documents using the above process, put them all in the same project subfolder (labelled 'reference'), then:

3) Use Adobe Reader X (my favourite so far) to search for specific terms in all documents in the folder. Adobe Reader's Advanced Search function is ignored by most people, but is in fact very efficient and pretty quick. It is capable of carrying out Boolean searches on all PDF documents in a given folder (including any subfolders of that folder). It then produces a list of hits - and this is where the outlining comes in. The list includes individual documents with, underneath the name of each document, a list of hits comprising chunks of every single sentence in which the search term(s) occur. The actual terms are highlighted in each chunk, and if you decide a particular document isn't relevant, you can collapse (fold) the list of hits for that particular document so you can concentrate on other documents. If you want to view a particular sentence in more detail, you simply click on it and Adobe Reader immediately pulls up a separate window with the document in it and the search term conveniently highlighted. It's easy to copy text out of Reader if you want to. You can, of course, have multiple Reader windows open if you want.

This is, in my experience, how outliners should work: by enabling you to produce a list of and then zoom in on specific items of information. There are those (especially CAT users) who will say "that's a very clunky way of doing things", but in fact it isn't. In my line of business (high-end translation of ad/marketing copy) you don't want to slavishly copy existing text. You want to see specific terms in context so you can use them effectively (and appropriately) in your new translations.

The above process is
- remarkably fast
- gives you direct access to client-approved terminology
- makes it easy to check exactly which documents (and what sort of documents) that terminology appears in (something that's not easy with CAT tools, which tend to treat all phrases in a "translation memory" as equivalent/homologous, regardless of their source(s); such tools treat concordance as a separate function - ridiculous, in my view).
- makes it easy to flip from 'search' mode to 'contextual' (concordance) mode.

The above may be of interest to other bilingual/multilingual researchers.

Cheers,
Bill

1. Chaos Intellect 4; My work is people centric. Besides the basics, the support is quick and the program is solid.
2. AskSam; Easiest program for me to throw data into the is client specific without having to finagle the inbox. Also, easiest to find data.
3. Atlantis Word Processor; Great for all kinds of writing.

Steve

1. A pen
2. A piece of scrap paper that will fit into my shirt pocket
3. My wife

When the gray bandwidth allows, I try to replace #3 with some software, usually a calendar program that sends e-mail reminders. This switchout frees up my wife for more important things in life, like enjoying it with me. ;)

--Ken

P.S. I just noticed this morning that in the latest version of MyInfo it is possible to paste in links to Evernote notes. It's good to have two of my favorite programs on speaking terms with each other.

Bill

1. ConnectedText - for keeping and managing notes and pieces of information
2. Mendeley - for managing references and my pdf archive, and for annotating pdfs
3. FocusWriter - for most of writing

Dr Andus, you obviously provided the speck of dust that started the rain; the forum clouds were ready and waiting :-)

I'll cheat, as usual, and answer for different situations:

[A] Working by myself on a major plan
1. Brainstorm for writing in 'detail' mode
2. MindView for mindmaps, plus organising and outputting the semi final text
3. MS Word for final formatting+graphics

[B] Collaboration
1. Google Apps Mail
2. Google Apps Calendar
3. Google Apps Drive/Docs

[C] Overview
1. Pen and paper for accionable info
2. Evernote for non-accionable info (so that I get it off my head)
3. Klok for time reporting (to myself)

Context -- I work as an independent health care business consultant. Have written a blog for 5 years and am writing a book. Most of my research/files in past has been using paper/files, but can see the future will demand migration toward digital & limited paper system.

1. Evernote -- for long term storage of just about everything, including research/background for blogging and forthcoming book
2. GREAT BIG HOLE (explained below) in workflow
3. Scrivener for Windows -- for (less than optimal) organizing and (very good) writing capabilities

I envision that #2 could be filled by something like Devon-Think (IF I used Mac, but I don't), or Connected-Text (if I wanted another stand-alone program, but I don't). So I wait.... until this hole gets filled by something that integrates (not just interfaces) with Evernote. Another way of describing #2 is that I have a boatload of information that for now I have to make sense of mostly through my own head, but would be great to have a digital program to augment this process (ala writing process described by Steven Berlin Johnson who uses Devon Think for Mac).

Vince

In my job as a teaching professor (as opposed to more research-oriented), here are my top 3 tools:

1. ConnectedText - I also use Evernote and WebResearch for capturing & storing content
2. TheBrain - amazing tool where I dump and organize PDFs, weblinks, ideas, and content
3. Mindmanager - for organizing my thoughts and presenting content to students

Obviously I use many other tools as well, but these are the top three that I couldn't work without. Well, these applications and DropBox, but I was only allowed three .
-- Glen

Hammer
Saw
Stanley Knife

Similar to an earlier poster, I would say my top 3 tools are a pen, paper, and Microsoft Word. These days I spend more time writing than I used to.

However, if we are talking about outliners/information managers then my list is: 1. Devonthink Pro 2. Papers 2(Bibliography manager/pdf manager) 3. Omnioutliner.

While I am relatively new to Omnioutliner, I have found it to be extermely useful as a task manager(I keep my master task list in there)and for outlining what I am writing. Once outlined in OO, I transfer the outline into Word.

Jim

Hi.

Depends on the scenario:

Scenario 1: organizing a magazine project (involving 5-8 coworkers)

1. LibreOffice Writer for writing
2. LibreOffice Calc for project management
3. Outlook for project management

Scenario 2: writing a small magazine

1. Word for writing and pre-formatting
2. OneNote as knowledge database
3. Outlook/LibreOffice calc for project management

Scenario 3: planning seminars

1. Noteliner for brainstorming
2. LibreOffice Calc for planning
3. LibreOffice Writer for writing the script
4. Evernote as knowledge database

MadaboutDana wrote:

3) Use Adobe Reader X (my favourite so far) to search for specific terms
in all documents in the folder. Adobe Reader's Advanced Search function
is ignored by most people, but is in fact very efficient and pretty
quick. It is capable of carrying out Boolean searches on all PDF
documents in a given folder (including any subfolders of that folder).
It then produces a list of hits - and this is where the outlining comes
in. The list includes individual documents with, underneath the name of
each document, a list of hits comprising chunks of every single sentence
in which the search term(s) occur. The actual terms are highlighted in
each chunk, and if you decide a particular document isn't relevant, you
can collapse (fold) the list of hits for that particular document so you
can concentrate on other documents. If you want to view a particular
sentence in more detail, you simply click on it and Adobe Reader
immediately pulls up a separate window with the document in it and the
search term conveniently highlighted. It's easy to copy text out of
Reader if you want to. You can, of course, have multiple Reader windows
open if you want.

Bill, interesting process, thanks for the description. However, I was intrigued that you found Adobe Reader better for search than PDF-XChange Viewer. I only have Reader 9, but I've just compared the searches side-by-side with XChange, and XChange was not only incomparably faster but it also found more entries!

I ran the test on a folder with 87 PDFs and some Word files, and for a one-word search term Adobe Reader found 8 documents with 36 instances (telling me one doc is inaccessible for being corrupt), while XChange found 9 documents with 58 entries (search lasting 12 sec - no stats produced by Adobe).

That's a pretty big difference! On top of that the search result was skewed because Adobe also included the Word files, while XChange didn't. So Adobe only returned 3 PDFs, while XChange found 9 PDFs!

Oh, how I envy those able to name just three "main" applications! But as Dr Andus did specify just outliner, PIM, writing, note-taking I suppose I would have plump for:

1) OneNote, as a general repository, library and archive

2) ConnectedText, for creating information wikis which will end up as websites

3) The Brain, for a project that is already a website but is too cumbersome to move to ConnectedText

Graham

Oh wow! I blush to admit that I haven't really investigated PDF-Xchange Viewer's Search function - it never occurred to me that it would be comparable (indeed, according to your experiment, superior) to Reader's. Wow! That's really exciting - I shall check it out forthwith. I already thought that PDF-Xchange Viewer was the cat's whiskers - a really powerful search function would turn it into the dog's boll... well, I'll report back, anyway.

Wow. Well, my first investigations of PDF-Xchange Viewer's search function hasn't uncovered such a large discrepancy between search results as yours, Dr. Andus, but my sample was much smaller. My observations:

- search options are pretty much identical, but PDF-Xchange Viewer's are nicely packaged in a simple 'Options' menu that appears when you open the 'Search PDF' box; preferable to the slightly scattered spread of options in Adobe Reader X's layout.

- the 'Search PDF' box in PDF-Xchange Viewer appears as a sidebar, which is nice and neat. On the other hand, in certain circumstances I can see myself preferring Adobe Reader's completely separate 'Search' window.

- subjectively, speed of search is much the same (albeit with a relatively small sample). Both applications speed up significantly once they've carried out a first search through a given folder/subfolders, so clearly there's some kind of cacheing going on.

- presentation of results is much the same: both use a friendly outliner-like layout, with document names as the main (top-level) nodes and search 'hits' neatly listed as subnodes, presented as fragments of sentences/phrases containing the highlighted search terms.

- when you click on a specific search 'hit' ('instance' in Reader, 'entry' in Viewer), both applications pull up the relevant document almost instantaneously, with the relevant hit term highlighted in the middle of the document window.

So at the very least, PDF-Xchange Viewer matches Adobe Reader X for convenience, accuracy and presentation. Add to that the fact that it also allows you to manipulate PDFs (by changing their properties, adding/extracting pages, making notes etc.) and costs about an eighth the price, and the arguments for making PDF-Xchange Viewer into your Adobe Acrobat alternative de choix become weighty!

Thank you so much for that extraordinarily useful revelation!

Cheers,
Bill

MadaboutDana wrote:

So at the very least, PDF-Xchange Viewer matches Adobe Reader X for
convenience, accuracy and presentation. Add to that the fact that it
also allows you to manipulate PDFs (by changing their properties,
adding/extracting pages, making notes etc.) and costs about an eighth
the price, and the arguments for making PDF-Xchange Viewer into your
Adobe Acrobat alternative de choix become weighty!
Thank you so much for that extraordinarily useful revelation!

Thank you for bringing this up, as otherwise I wouldn't have noticed that different PDF readers produce different search results.

Regarding the speed, you might be right, perhaps XChange was faster on my system because it has already indexed the files during past searches, while I don't tend to use Adobe Reader much.

In the meantime I've upgraded to Adobe Reader XI to see if it makes a difference. It returns the same (incomplete) result, except now it includes 4 PDFs (instead of 3). But there is still no sign of the other 6 PDFs that XChange finds with the same search term. I think I'll be sticking with XChange for my searches for now...

Dr Andus wrote:

In the meantime I've upgraded to Adobe Reader XI to see if it makes a
difference. It returns the same (incomplete) result, except now it
includes 4 PDFs (instead of 3). But there is still no sign of the other
6 PDFs that XChange finds with the same search term. I think I'll be
sticking with XChange for my searches for now...

Out of curiosity I also ran the test in Copernic Desktop Search and it also found 9 PDFs, just like XChange. And it seemed the fastest of all 3 (again, perhaps because of the indexing).

Yes, perfectly true, Copernic does create indexes (indices), unlike the two others. But I think the two others win in terms of search result presentation!

I hadn't realised Adobe Reader XI is out - I must download it.

BTW, thank you all for your replies. Some interesting combinations of tools came up here. It looks like the "3 tools" restriction was conducive to revealing some of the implicit workflows, which I find even more interesting than the tools themselves.

Zoot - For quickly grabbing, highlighting and categorizing information from the Web. Mostly I grab and highlight text rather than whole Web pages. (I'm a news editor and I'm constantly on deadline, so speed is paramount and Zoot is the best tool for this in my experience)

OneNote - For more leisurely notetaking, modest outlining, storing staff emails by project (retrieving archived email is a nightmare in my office and you can dump email from Outlook to a destination in OneNote with one click.) I also like its flawless synchronization so I always have it on my phone, at home and on my laptop. It's also great for grabbing images. I could do some or all of this in Zoot but find it wanting in various respects.

UltraEdit - For writing, coding, sometimes outlining and numerous other text manipulation tasks. I prefer writing in plain text and sometimes toy with going plain-text only but it doesn't work well for marking up articles and other reasons.

survival on a lonely island would probably work if I had these
1. Office
2. MindManager
3. Dtsearch

(now, I guess that for most folks in this forum "top 30" would be easier to answer :-)