PC Notebook & Outliner

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Posted by Deevid
Dec 17, 2014 at 04:37 PM

I am in the process of researching and making notes for a literature review, and I am having a hard time to organize notes in a coherent and neat way.

I looked for ideas on the internet and bump into http://www.organizingcreativity.com, which explain a very interesting way of capturing and later organizing ideas by using the Circus Ponies Notebook (CPN).

The gist is to make notes of each reference source in CPN, and then copy the bits of information for each source into an outline, delineating the structure of your final product and shuffling the pieces of information until the outline flows the way you like. Finally you’d use a different application for the writing (e.g. Scrivener) by following that outline.

I’ve been unsuccessfully looking for an application with similar capabilities to Circus Ponies Notebook but for PC in Windows 7. The closer that I got was with NoteShare, which is fine but definitely not optimized for PC. The main features I am looking for are:
- Easy to use drag and drop outlining
- Easy to copy and paste from sources and between different outlines
- Can include pictures
- Tags
- Desktop and offline version
- Check boxes is a plus

Thank you

Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Dec 17, 2014 at 08:26 PM

The only application that comes to mind is OneNote. Though it is not an outliner, you can outline with it. I wrote about my own views of its outlining capabilities here:

https://welcometosherwood.wordpress.com/2012/07/19/announcing-the-onenote-smack-down/

If you find a better solution, I would love to read about it. Thank you.

Steve Z.

Posted by jaslar
Dec 17, 2014 at 10:24 PM

I’m a longtime user of Notecase Pro. Cherry Tree is a work-alike. This is a two pane outliner, but with the ability to putting images, files, links on the right, and outline headings on the left.

For longer works, I’ve used it for my notetaking, then either copy and paste to the writing part of the outline, or have two outline files next to each other on screen.

Notecase Pro is available as a Windows program, Mac, and Linux, which has further advantages if you tend to hop around machines. All of them work with Dropbox. Notecase also has encryption.

Posted by jaslar
Dec 17, 2014 at 10:25 PM

Also supports wonderful commands for editing the outline (shift-arrow), tags, mark and gather, and powerful searching.

Posted by Dr Andus
Dec 17, 2014 at 11:57 PM

Deevid wrote:
> The main features I am looking for are:
>- Easy to use drag and drop outlining
>- Easy to copy and paste from sources and between different outlines
>- Can include pictures
>- Tags
>- Desktop and offline version
>- Check boxes is a plus

How about

RightNote:
http://bauerapps.com/rightnote/

TreeProjects:
http://personaldatabase.org/

To some extent ConnectedText might also fit the bill, but including pictures is a bit more fiddly (need to save it on drive first and then drag and drop, rather than copy and paste).

WhizFolders might be another possibility.

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