Long Outlines In NoteMap

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Posted by Gary Carson
Jun 29, 2008 at 02:17 PM

Question about Notemap bugs:

I know about the problems with exporting outlines to Word and notes that are too long to display all at once on the same screen.

Has anyone had trouble with big outlines, i.e., massive outlines with tons of entries? Memory problems? Corruption? Miscellaneous PITA issues?

I’m asking because the CRIMP God struck me with lightning and I’ve been commanded to create one gigantic outline containing EVERYTHING so I will never have trouble locating anything again and all my problems will be solved forever.

Posted by Cassius
Jun 30, 2008 at 01:06 AM

Gary Carson wrote:
>Question about Notemap bugs:
> >I know about the problems with exporting outlines to
>Word and notes that are too long to display all at once on the same screen.
> >Has anyone
>had trouble with big outlines, i.e., massive outlines with tons of entries? Memory
>problems? Corruption? Miscellaneous PITA issues?
> >I’m asking because the CRIMP
>God struck me with lightning and I’ve been commanded to create one gigantic outline
>containing EVERYTHING so I will never have trouble locating anything again and all my
>problems will be solved forever.

Gary,

You belong in a Wall Street investment bank. That way, when the outline crashes the Fed will bail you out and you can continue to make insanely risky choices.

More realistically: When I was the senior author and editor of a large report written in Word with many contributors, I purposely saved each chapter and appendix as a separate document. I combined them only as a zip file—not as a single document. Why? The experience of one of our contractors, who also produced a large report written in Word by many contributors. One (or more) of the submitted contributions was a corrupted Word file. The corrupted submission caused the entire document to become corrupted, resulting in the editor having to retype all 200+ pages.

You should also be aware that emailing a Word file as an attachment can cause format and font changes requiring a review of the entire document. I know this is true because I did tests/experiments that proved that changes occurred. Zipping the file before attaching it may help, but I have not tested that.

-c

Posted by Gary Carson
Jun 30, 2008 at 01:57 PM

I’ve never had any trouble with long Word documents—the longest one I’ve created so far was around 600 pages—but my documents are pretty basic.

In my experience, Word starts to have corruption issues when you get into master documents, linked files, etc., but I’m just a hack fiction writer and I never use any of that stuff. In fact, I just discovered DarkRoom by reading through this forum and I’m completely sold. Minimalism is the way to go if you ask me.

I was wondering if NoteMap started to run into problems with very long outlines. I’ve been using it off and on for years and I’ve got a directory with twenty or thirty different outlines—exactly the kind of confusing proliferation of files I’ve been trying to avoid. I’m going to combine them all into one big master outline, but I’ve never created a really long NoteMap outline and considering the other bugs reported here was wondering if it was going to start choking after a certain point.

Posted by Cassius
Jun 30, 2008 at 04:22 PM

Gary,

Sorry, but I have no experience with long NoteMap outlines.

-c

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