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Single-pane outliner with inline notes and customisable column
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Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Mar 18, 2013 at 10:38 AM
Dr Andus wrote:
>I’d prefer to have a single scrollable page overview of the
>whole matrix.
Hm, you could of course turn to Excel alone, but that’s not very long-text friendly. I personally find Google Spreadsheet more amicable towards such structured writing, e.g. for grant proposals, where I want to keep a form’s field description next to my actual text to help me focus. On the downside, Google Spreadsheet doesn’t allow diversified formatting within a cell and has no outline (grouping) functionality as far as I am aware.
Posted by MadaboutDana
Mar 18, 2013 at 11:22 AM
Best of all is OpenOffice/LibreOffice Sheet (or whatever they call it nowadays), which is rich-text-friendly (in a way that Excel, for example, isn’t). You get none of the unstable, unpredictable behaviour of Excel in LibreOffice Sheet, partly because they’re using the suite’s built-in rich-text editor, I believe. This also means you can manipulate really large chunks of text without Excel’s sudden “oh no, where’s it all gone!?!” moments.
Oh, and like Excel, both versions of Sheet support outlining. It’s not beautiful, but it works.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 18, 2013 at 01:15 PM
There’s an older program called Notebox Disorganizer, which might be just what you are looking for. It’s actually quite ingenious, and I wish it had been developed further. This seems to be merely a hobby project for the developer, who has promised a revised version for quite a while. Nevertheless, the current version works (at least on Windows 7), and uses the very matrix approach you describe, I think.
https://sites.google.com/site/squirreltechnologist/home/software
Steve Z.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Mar 18, 2013 at 01:21 PM
P.S. Don’t be fooled by the screenshot of Notebox, which makes it look like a spreadsheet. You can easily expand the cells to show much of the text.
Posted by Dr Andus
Mar 18, 2013 at 02:01 PM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
P.S. Don’t be fooled by the screenshot of Notebox, which makes it look
>like a spreadsheet. You can easily expand the cells to show much of the
>text.
Steve & Alexander, thanks for the Notebox Disorganizer tip, it looks interesting indeed! However, I haven’t been able to expand the row height (only the column width). I wonder if it’s a Win7 64-bit limitation, or I just need to read the Help notes to figure out how to do it…