How did columns work in Ecco Pro? That was reportedly the strength of the program - an outliner with columns. There are outliners like Redhaven and Treeline that treat each node as a database record that can also have field information, but from the descriptions I've read of Ecco Pro, it was doing something different.

James Salla wrote:

How did columns work in Ecco Pro? That was reportedly the strength of the program - an outliner with columns

Some of these introductory pages are outdated, but still explain how columns are used in InfoQube, which was also the way Ecco Pro used columns:
(The thing to remember is that an Ecco column displays an Ecco folder. In IQ, folders are called a fields)

https://infoqubeim.com/drupal5/?q=node/34
https://infoqubeim.com/drupal5/?q=node/861
https://infoqubeim.com/drupal5/?q=node/261
https://infoqubeim.com/drupal5/?q=node/3167

Pierre
IQ Designer
https://infoqubeim.com/drupal5/?q=booktree

They were nifty, and could be formatted in different ways. I haven't tried to replicate them in OmniOutliner.

James Salla wrote:

How did columns work in Ecco Pro? That was reportedly the strength of
the program - an outliner with columns. There are outliners like
Redhaven and Treeline that treat each node as a database record that can
also have field information, but from the descriptions I've read of Ecco
Pro, it was doing something different.

The columns were like other nodes in the outline? If you put a check in a column, that item would also appear under that column's node?

James Salla wrote:

The columns were like other nodes in the outline? If you put a check in a column, that item would also appear under that column's node?

No, not really. Columns (which are the same as folders/Fields) have little to do with item hierarchy.
It is just a property of an item.
When you put a check in a column for an item, your basically assigning a value for that folder

However, if that folder is shown in a notepad as a folder (i.e. not as a column), then assigning a value to that folder would show the item in the notepad, under that folder

Pierre

Pierre explained it pretty well, but just to give a concrete example, one thing you might do in Ecco is create outlines of notes from various meetings, and then add columns "Assigned to Bob", "Assigned to Emma", etc. If you check off various items as assigned to one of those people, you can create a new tab "Assigned to Bob" that will consolidate all items from anywhere assigned to Bob on a single page. Basically a live-updating filtered view of your whole database. You can also assign a calendar item or anything else that appears in Ecco to Bob, and they'll all appear on that new tab. But unlike a filtered view in many tools, Ecco *also* displays context for outlined items that are brought into a view. In Ecco speak, these are called outline "context parents", so for example, on Bob's page, you can immediately see, oh, this task was assigned to Bob during meeting X in a discussion about Y, this other task came from meeting Y, etc.

And Ecco columns can contain various data types, so for example you can see all deadlines assigned to one person at a glance, live-updating.

The hierarchical context parents concept is part of what made Ecco easier to grasp than the earlier Lotus Agenda, where you might have a page consolidating everything assigned to Bob, but you'd have to look into each item to understand its context.

--Chris

Another way to do that in Ecco would be to create a drop-down list called Assigned to, and the choices you'd create were Emma, Bob, etc. So in one column you'd have who it was assigned to, and another tab could show whichever values you wanted.

Ecco also allowed you to select more than one choice from a drop-down list - a HUGE advantage over the similar feature in OmniOutliner.

Another feature that I wish Omni would provide is use tabs to show different views from one file. In Ecco, you'd put everything about a project in one file, and in different tabs view that information in different ways; i.e., one view would show who various items were assigned to, another tab would show due items by due dates, another for priorities, etc.

And, as Chris noted, showing "context parents" was enormously helpful. Crucial, I think. The lack of it is what keeps me from loving OmniOutliner. It's good, but I just can't use it for the wide variety of uses that I enjoyed with Ecco Pro.

rogbar wrote:

Another feature that I wish Omni would provide is use tabs to show different views from one file. In Ecco, you’d put everything about a project in one file, and in different tabs view that information in different ways; (...)
And, as Chris noted, showing "context parents" was enormously helpful. Crucial, I think. The lack of it is what keeps me from loving OmniOutliner.

I guess you just need to use InfoQube then, as it has everything Ecco had (and much more), and which OmniOutliner doesn't... ;-)

Pierre
(cheap shot I know, but couldn't stop myself from adding it)

James,
As I remember it values in a column could be represented as a folder. Kind of a smart folder.

So if you had an Outline with a list type column called 'Assigned to' with values of 'Mary', 'Bob' and 'Tom' you would find a folder in the sidebar called 'Assigned to' with subfolders called 'Mary', 'Bob' and 'Tom'. Clicking in 'Tom' would show rows from any outline where the 'Assigned to' column was used so you could have rows from multiple outlines where the common value was 'Tom'.

In this sense if you had multiple Projects and various rows in each project assigned to Tom, you could see all those rows in the 'Tom' folder irrespective of which Outline (project) the rows were contained in.

I am thinking of adding that functionality to SheetPlanner in the future....
Regards,
Peter

James Salla wrote:

How did columns work in Ecco Pro? That was reportedly the strength of
the program - an outliner with columns. There are outliners like
Redhaven and Treeline that treat each node as a database record that can
also have field information, but from the descriptions I've read of Ecco
Pro, it was doing something different.