In search of a more structured Microsoft Word (for collecting documents & notes)

[MrCrispy]

My dad currently keeps all his data in a bunch of Word doc's. This includes all his personal as well as work correspondence and he also has a huge (1000+ pages) files in which he writes and maintains poems. He uses this as his scratchpad for new ideas as well as to copy and paste from his email.

I'm trying to find some software which will help him organize all this. Most importantly, I'd like him to stop using huge Word documents to store and find info because they are not at all well suited for the task, and if the file is damaged he'll lose everything.

But at the same time, the replacement can't be something which is too techie and is hard to use. It has to be free-form enough to let him use it without having to click around or understand a lot of jargon.

Right now I think my best bet is OneNote but I'm not too sure if its a good fit for large amounts of data.

[jgpaiva]

My first reaction is to tell you to look at note-taking software.
I don't think there could be any problems with that kind of software not being able to keep or search through the data, they are made for that
Also, there's a (too) good resource here at DC about it: http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=2362.0]find it here.
That's 15 pages of posts, though

[mouser]

OneNote does seem like a natural match though, especially if he is relatively happy with MS Word currently.

[dhuser]

I found a program, by Waseo, called TextArranger. It seems like it may do what you want. I tried once, and it is pretty good, for free.

Also, much smaller that MS Word to use

URL: http://waseo.de/articles.php?lng=en&pg=55

dhuser

[MrCrispy]

We're trying out OneNote 2007 trial right now to see if he likes it. I wish they'd provided an easier way to import data from Word and other apps as well.