view contents of only one item, or multiple items?

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Posted by jimspoon
May 27, 2008 at 04:34 AM

One of the things I like about Ecco is the ability to view the contents (usually text) of many items at once. Ecco has a columnar grid - the “Item Text” field of an item is in the left-most column, with additional fields being displayed in columns to the right. All the text in the Item Text field is displayed, and can be wrapped over many lines.

Compare this to Ultra Recall. An item may contain child items, and an item’s child items are also displayed in a columnar grid. And you can display the “Item Text” as one of the columns in this columnar grid. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a way to display all the lines, or multiple lines of this Item Text in the columnar grid. It seems you can only display part of the first line (so much as will fit in the space allocated for the column). So, to view all the Item Text for an item, you have to select that item. The contents of that item - and only that item - will be displayed in the Item Details pane. To go through all the contents of a number of items, you have select each item in turn by a mouse click or keystroke. (You can display the whole text by hovering the mouse over it - it will appear in a tooltip.) A lot of two and three-pane PIMs seem to follow a similar approach.

It’s a small thing - but sometimes little things make a big difference! I’m very impressed with UR (and similar PIMs), but the ability to have multiple lines per item in the columnar grid would be a very nice option. (If I’m wrong, and UR does have this ability, please let me know!)

Posted by Pierre Paul Landry
May 27, 2008 at 01:53 PM

Hi Jim,
Have you tried SQLNotes recently ? It is progressing rapidly and now includes features not in other PIMs, such as live search, Gantt charts, task dependancies and of course, Ecco’s implementation of items and user-defined fields, with many, many improvements over the original Ecco concept, such as multiple parents (logical linking in UR), computing, summarizing and graphing capabilities, rich text 1-pane AND 2-pane editor modes, advanced Journaling, multiple outlines (Project explorer in UR), user scripts and powerful export capabilities (through ODBC apps, such as MSWord, Excel or through HTML). I’m the designer of SQLNotes. Free while in beta. http://www.sqlnotes.net

Posted by jimspoon
May 27, 2008 at 06:02 PM

Whoops! UR does have the ability to wrap grid cell text over multiple lines in the grid.

Tools / Options / Grid / Wrap Long Cell Text

Using this option, it’s possible to display all the Item Text in the grid, not just in the Item Details pane.

Pierre - I am going through the SQLN help today. Looks very nice. I’m looking forward to the time when I can just say a fond farewell to Ecco. I wish I had more time to devote to just learning these programs!

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