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Posted by andyjim
Sep 10, 2013 at 11:59 PM
Couple of questions (newbie here) about CT. I want to build a “thought base”, collecting, classing and massaging thoughts from many past files of mine. This will involve hundreds if not thousands of text items. Best I can tell, CT requires a unique name for each topic. While I can probably fit most of these items under 30 or so categories, coming up with a unique title for each item seems out of reach. Any way around this requirement? I have the trial version, haven’t decided yet whether to buy.
Second question is a tech help question. I’ve created an outline, but now I cannot close it. I get a pop up saying “outline is modified, do you want to save it?” I say yes and nothing happens. I wonder if it’s because I have not named the outline, which I do not see how to do.
I’d also like to solicit recommendations here if anyone can suggest a more ideal software for my thought base project than CT. I do need outliner capability because that is how I think and write.
Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 11, 2013 at 08:16 AM
andyjim wrote:
>This will involve hundreds if not thousands of text items. Best
>I can tell, CT requires a unique name for each topic. While I can
>probably fit most of these items under 30 or so categories, coming up
>with a unique title for each item seems out of reach. Any way around
>this requirement?
I presume these thousands of text items already have their own file names, so as far as I understand, you can just put them all in the same folder and use CT’s import wizard to import them. I think CT will just keep the same names for the topic titles. Then you can use categories within CT to classify them etc.
>Second question is a tech help question. I’ve created an outline, but
>now I cannot close it. I get a pop up saying “outline is modified, do
>you want to save it?” I say yes and nothing happens. I wonder if it’s
>because I have not named the outline, which I do not see how to do.
Saving the outline doesn’t close it. To get rid of it, you can open a new outline, or an already saved outline, or close the Outline pane altogether.
>I’d also like to solicit recommendations here if anyone can suggest a
>more ideal software for my thought base project than CT. I do need
>outliner capability because that is how I think and write.
That will be a subjective choice. If you want something similar to but not CT, you could try some of the other desktop wikis (Zim, Wikidpad - though I don’t know about their outliner), TheBrain, Piggydb, MS OneNote, myBase or some more hierarchical-type tools like UltraRecall.
Posted by andyjim
Sep 11, 2013 at 11:45 AM
Thanks much, Dr. Andus, for your input. Been reading you here and there, and I doubt there are many as informed as you on this stuff.
Most do not have their own filenames (I should’ve made that clear), as I generate them in a sort of stream of consciousness file, which I do in Word outline. I call it a freeboard, and do one each year.
I’ve used Word outline for nearly 20 years I guess, and love it. Clean - no messy icons, bullets, etc. I can drop a bunch of loose text in, slap it into outline view and massage it with keystrokes. Can you do this (drop text in, then mess with it in the outliner) in other outliner apps? I’ve tried only a few (shallow pockets).
So one of my questions should have been, can I do this (drop text in, then outline it) in CT? I will need to be able to for my project.
As to the outline window in CT - I cannot close it. I hit the x and it just pops up the save message; will not close. And I cannot open a new outline - pops up the save message again. But, once I find what I’m doing wrong with that, it sounds as though you’re saying I cannot have more than one outline window open at once in CT. Hmm. Everything I write is in outline, because Word outline, with its keystroke manipulation, is my rearranging tool, and Word outline is so clean. It’s really the ease of manipulation, as much as the outline format itself, that I’m after.
Ok, that gets me to another requirement for my project: I want to have a number of snippets open on the desktop, shuffle them around, stack them up, snip and move text from one to another, gather them and slap them all into an outline for further massaging. I’d prefer each window, each snippet have outline capability, but can do without that if I can manipulate snippets freely. (Gingko?)
Do any of the other apps you suggested (Zim, Wikidpad, TheBrain, Piggydb, MS OneNote, myBase or UltraRecall) have good clean outline and snippet manipulation capabilities?
As you notice, I’m not even mentioning wiki capabilities, but that’s only because I have no experience with wiki. I’d probably like it a lot, maybe even wonder how I ever got along without, but in my ignorance of that, outlining and text manipulation are my priorities. I might sing a different tune if I got my feet wet with something like CT. I guess it’s more or less relational vs hierarchic. I think the ideal would be both, which CT sort of is, I gather. Yet it may lack the efficient text manipulation I’m looking for.
Or perhaps the right combination of apps, something like the way you (Dr. Andus) approach things, might better suit my particular quirkiness. Two, three, even four simple apps, if they work well together, might do better than one monolith. Any thoughts?
Sorry so lengthy. Don’t know how to be brief.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Sep 11, 2013 at 11:52 AM
AndyJim,
If I understand you correctly, you have longer documents that you want to split into shorter snippets. If that is the case, you can do that very easily with CT. Dump the text into one topic (what CT calls a single document), then there is a command that will take selected text, cut it from the current topic, create a new topic, leaving behind a wiki link in the original topic. With this process you can cut a long topic into many small ones very quickly.
Steve Z.
Posted by Dr Andus
Sep 11, 2013 at 12:43 PM
andyjim wrote:
>Most do not have their own filenames
As Steve has suggested, you can import your existing Word documents and then chop them up using the “cut to new topic” function.
>ICan you do this
>(drop text in, then mess with it in the outliner) in other outliner
>apps?
Well, each of them have strengths and weaknesses in this respect.
>So one of my questions should have been, can I do this (drop text in,
>then outline it) in CT? I will need to be able to for my project.
There would be a number of options to do this in CT. 1) You could keep your notes in a single long topic (the original imported Word doc) and use the headings markup to overlay an outline, which can be viewed in the Table of Contents pane. 2) You could use the aforementioned “cut to new topic” to move selected sections to new topics, and then view the relationship between the original topic and the newly linked topics in the Navigator pane. 2) You could also create a new meta-outline in the Outline pane, by dragging and dropping the newly cut-away topics into a new hierarchy in the .cto outline.
>As to the outline window in CT - I cannot close it. I hit the x and it
>just pops up the save message; will not close. And I cannot open a new
>outline - pops up the save message again. But, once I find what I’m
>doing wrong with that, i
Not quite sure what you’re trying to do. You should certainly be able to close the Outline pane altogether after saving whatever outline you have open.
>t sounds as though you’re saying I cannot have
>more than one outline window open at once in CT. Hmm.
You can only have two (.cto) outlines open at a time: the Outline pane, and the Project Outline pane. I get around this restriction by exporting the outlines as OPML files and viewing them in Natara Bonsai instead.
>Ok, that gets me to another requirement for my project: I want to have a
>number of snippets open on the desktop, shuffle them around, stack them
>up, snip and move text from one to another, gather them and slap them
>all into an outline for further massaging. I’d prefer each window, each
>snippet have outline capability, but can do without that if I can
>manipulate snippets freely. (Gingko?)
CT might not be the most flexible or fastest tool for this. Have you checked whether you have MS OneNote installed? People sometimes don’t realise it’s installed as part of their MS Office suite.
>Do any of the other apps you suggested (Zim, Wikidpad, TheBrain,
>Piggydb, MS OneNote, myBase or UltraRecall) have good clean outline and
>snippet manipulation capabilities?
I don’t really use any of them. For rearranging lot of snippets into an outline I tend to use Outline 4D’s (aka StoryView) outline view. For a free option you could try Noteliner.