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Text outliner/organiser/editor

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ashwken:
My idea was a two pane outliner/text editor with a hierarchical outline tree on the left and a text pane on the right. With the ability to see all the text from selected nodes together - either in the text pane or another. And the ability to re-order the tree using drag and drop. I was sure that there would be many programs that could do this - and maybe there are, but I haven't found them.

Ideally, the program would be no more complicated than this; other features aren't needed.
-Dormouse (April 02, 2008, 01:29 PM)
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Ultra Recall will allow for the first - Show Combined Text for Multiple Selections - but may not meet your second criteria.

steeladept:
Here is an idea on how to use Word. I have played with this idea many times, though my needs are not as complex as yours.  What's more, if you can make it work, it should work with every version since Word95, maybe earlier.

Try giving each section a different style.  The styles can be the same but use a different name.  Then, with a little macro, you can select all text with the given style.  Once selected, you can cut, paste, move it around, or change it without affecting the rest of the document.

I never actually did this, but I did something similar with excel and it worked reasonably well.  It may just be a thing with excel, but I would hope not.  Perhaps that is all you need with what you already know and do.

Dormouse:
Thanks for the response and info Armando. I hadn't seen your earlier thread and it is interesting that you have travelled a similar path. Maybe it looks as if there is a niche market waiting for a reasonable product. Ideally, I'd be able to add little yellow stickies too that would stick to the bit of the document I put them on. And tagging (and the ability to select and cut and paste by tag would be good - something I've not yet managed in OneNote) + the usual highlighting and comments options. But just the fast simple bit would do.

Why do I not want to use Word? Well, it is just too slow and big and cumbersome for something that is fundamentally simple. I don't need all the formatting and collaborating etc etc functions for this task. I've given up actually typing in Word for the same reason. It's like going out to play tennis in an overcoat and waterproof. That's the first reason.

The second is that I've never got it to do the job as easily as I think the job could be done. I assume that was the reason for your own  search for alternatives. I'm not sure that I'll not end up back with using Word for the lack of better alternative ways of doing it. I think the basic problem is that Word confounds the use of headings with the idea of outlining. Headings will be wanted in many documents to make the presentation easier to read, and they may or may not map on to outlines. An outline is simply a way of breaking the whole into smaller and smaller parts and then being able to use those parts to redesign the whole. If the document is like a building, the outlines can be like bricks at the lowest level, then sections of wall in ever greater sizes and finally whole walls. They don't necessarily need to be headings but they do need a sufficiently detailed description of what they are so that you know what you are doing when you redesign the document just using the outlines. Programs like most of the outliners, Keynote etc etc etc all have proper outliners which don't affect the use of headings and text.

For my purposes, there are two things for me to do using an outliner before rearranging the document. The first is to create an outline for the new document(s). The second is to go through the original material and select the components I need for each document and then to break them down into the bits I will rearrange. Some will need to be broken into bricks, sometimes whole sections of wall can be kept as they are - but I will need a description of each so I can work out what I am doing just with the outline.Then I would want to use the outliner to arrange the material.

Word does not make it easy to break the text into bricks; if a brick is a single sentence, a heading isn't what I want. And it does not make it easy to tag or otherwise identify the sections I want for the new document. But I agree it can be done. Maybe I can use the clipboard as a brick container; do it by sections, then break a section into as many bricks as necessary and insert as needed from the clipboard; 24 isn't too bad a number for that.

I don't find the document map especially helpful because you can't do anything with it except look and navigate around the document. This feature seems to have been removed in 2007, though no doubt I will rediscover it when I least expect it. I agree that the outlining in Word was always very strong compared to other WPs. I'd never come across Textmaker before, but the manual didn't seem to make much of its outlining capacity. I do use OO - and maybe I ought to try how well it does outlining, but somehow I doubt if it will be better.

The reason I want to see the bodytext alone while I am working is that is what the final copy will look like. I will just be confused by having headings appear inside paragraphs. And really this is a task I want to be able to focus my concentration on without distractions on the screen.

I'm not convinced that OneNote will be better for this than Word. Possibly just different advantages and disadvantages. I do see its value in original document creation though. I also see how it might be the best way of analysing and splitting the document into components. Then I could do the new outline in Word for the bits where headings are OK (maybe a more detailed outline in something else that I can overlay and use as a guide) and carry bricks from OneNote 24 at a time. I can see that might work.

Dormouse:
Ultra Recall will allow for the first - Show Combined Text for Multiple Selections - but may not meet your second criteria.-ashwken (April 03, 2008, 11:19 AM)
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I didn't realise Ultra Recall would do this. I'd just assumed it was just an info store. I'll d/l and have a look. Thanks.

PS I see that Show Combined Text for Multiple Selections requires the Pro version  :(

Dormouse:
Try giving each section a different style.  The styles can be the same but use a different name.  Then, with a little macro, you can select all text with the given style.  Once selected, you can cut, paste, move it around, or change it without affecting the rest of the document.-steeladept (April 03, 2008, 12:07 PM)
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Intriguing idea, though I'm not a great user of macros and I'm not quite sure how to go about selecting for styles in a document. I can have a look for it though.

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