Poll : does anyone use Microsoft Word’s outline view simultaneously with another view ?
Good old Issue 3959 got some minor activity lately as drhatch had an interesting insight :
I wish to call into question a fundamental assumption that has been made about this effort, the assumption that has held up development for years: that multiple layout capability must exist before outline view can be useful.
This is holding up outline view because multiple layout capability (issue 81480) is a big effort, and it, in turn, requires refactoring of writer’s usage of the drawing layer (issue 100875) and the latter has some significant technical difficulties. It seems unlikely that these issues will be finished soon.
The logic behind this assumption is that switching views will take too long if multiple layouts are not possible and/or most users will need simultaneous viewing for outline view to be useful. I disagree with both these assertions.
1. Simultaneous viewing is not necessary. I have been using Word’s outline view extensively for years without simultaneous viewing. Even though it’s possible with split screens, it takes up screen real estate that I want to use otherwise.
2. It won’t take that long to switch layouts [..]
I, for one, would much rather have an outline view soon, one that takes a couple of seconds to switch, and which is available only as a single view, than wait the extra time it is going to take for the multiple-layout refactoring to be finished. That would be enough for me for a long time.
This is a case of “perfect” being the enemy of “good enough”. Let’s just have “good enough” for a while first.
Is his experience anecdotal, or do people really seldom or never use Microsoft Word’s outline view simultaneously with another view ? Other users have chimed in, but me too contributions will soon be boring… So here is my attempt at helping quantify user expectations : this poll !
Of course, self selection by passionate users and links from OpenOffice forums will certainly bias the sampling beyond any semblance of representativity, but we’ll take that as better than nothing…
11 responses to “Poll : does anyone use Microsoft Word’s outline view simultaneously with another view ?”
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No, never used… Vote for outline!
I use the outline mode daily. I don’t need to have multiple views at once. I toggle WHEN I need to, but that is not often. The outline view is my main form of using Word.
I use — and hate — Word daily, but only because of outlining and style sheets. I also use OO/NO to finish every document, and have donated to support development of both OO and NO. If I could get outlining, even without other views simultaneously, I would let Word die. And donate again.
I didn’t even know that simultaneous different views were possible, and never desired it.
I agree with #1. Luis .. Please code single-view Outline asap .. Microsoft has recently dropped all security patch support for Office 2000 and there will be a lot of people wanting to switch to OO/Writer but the lack of fundamental functionality like Outline mode is a barrier to converts.
Thanks for doing this non-representative poll if for no other reason than to cut the clutter. drhatch deserves a medal too: he put his finger on why there was resistance by developers to this necessity. I could never understand why they would pour so much love and attention on doing citation indexes in OpenOffice and yet refuse point blank to address what is for many of us, the primary reason why we cannot shift away from M$Office. The boys at MS must have been laughing. Oh well.
As one of the earliest persons to pile into the fray:
There is no need to have outline view appear at the same time as any other view. To a professional writer, it is a specialty view and you get into it and then right back out of it.
I am a software developer and often have to write concepts and documentation, beside some private documents.
In Word I almost always start writing in the outline view, creating the headings, shifting levels, moving them up and down. Afterwards I switch to layout view to put in the content.
Every now and then I use outline view to restructure an already existing document.
More than once I tried to work the same way with OpenOffice Navigator and it was a pain.
Not only is it not fluent to create new headings, I never really figured out how to switch per simple shortcut between the document and the outline treeview.
Moving headings up/down or increasing/decreasing level per shortcut… Never find a hint about how to do that!
For a tool which states loudly to be “fully keyboard usable” it is a joke that absolutely no shortcut is mentioned at the description of a function. It always reads ‘click here’ and ‘click there’.
So:
1.) Rethink the help texts
2.) Show shortcuts in tooltip texts too.
3.) Make Navigator outline more fluent in use, especially the switch between Navigator outline tree and document.
4.) Better than 3: Create a usable outline view!
I find it really, really uncomprehensible that after such a long time and great success of this tool, this special requirement/use case is ignored in such a weird manner
MS Word outline view is, in my experience, too buggy to be used in any way that is not strictly conventional. So *of course* no one uses simultaneous views. We can’t know for sure if such a feature, properly implemented, would be useful because a proper implementation does not yet exist *anywhere*. I sorta doubt it myself…though maybe someone with dual monitors might find it handy. Certainly for me, getting a working (even if limited) outline mode quickly is much, much more important.
chiming in much too late I’m sure but … I use Word’s Outline mode in both my technical and my creative writing, mainly to slap sections around, and/or check granularity (e.g., “Do all Topics in this document have an Intro and a See also section”?) ~ In other words, for years it has allowed me to do the electronic equivalent of “write your subtopics / topic sentences on notecards, then arrange them in order to structure your document, and then expand/write each.”
Truly, I use OO for almost everything, but am about to pop $100 for Office 2007 JUST FOR OUTLINE MODE … I would rather pay for an outliner extension to OO, yanno?
(And i see that Det put it much more elegantly, so I will quote and second:
In Word I almost always start writing in the outline view, creating the headings, shifting levels, moving them up and down. Afterwards I switch to layout view to put in the content.