Month: April 2008

FeedDemon is my feed reader of choice and has been for a very long time now. I loved FeedDemon so much that I actually paid for it when it wasn’t free.

It’s now free which just adds to the goodness.

Steve commented a few days ago, when talking about email overload that:

If anything I find I suffer much more from RSS overload than Email overload, but RSS readers are designed from the get go to help people cope

I would agree. My feed list is several hundred long, most of them active, but FeedDemon allows me to scan through them in a way that I regularly find remarkable. If I had as many email as feed posts I wouldn’t cope, but I do cope and cope quite well.

Feeds have revolutionised the way that I interact with the web – I rarely go to any web site to see what’s new. I used to go around a set of sites regularly, it was frustrating and annoying and took up loads of time. Feeds give me the changes, FeedDemon presents them in a way that allows me to scan through them quickly.

My favourite key combination within FeedDemon is ctrl+d which takes you to the next feed with unread items. On one of my keyboards the “d” key is starting to look a little warn which shows how often I use it.

My normal working habit is to scan through quickly flagging things within FeedDemon that I am going to read soon and I tag things into del.icio.us (using  FeedDemon) that I want to remember for some indeterminate point in the future. I tend to do this early in my working day. If I’ve got some time to read I’ll do it there and then, if I haven’t I’ll close FeedDemon down, leaving it closed until I have time to do some reading.

If I forget to close FeedDemon I find myself going back to it to see if there is anything interesting happening in the world – this becomes a huge time drain.

One of my biggest friends in FeedDemon is the “Panic Button”.

On returning to my feeds after my holiday last week I hit the panic button and marked a load of older feeds read. As the dialogue says – this isn’t email after all. I’ve recently introduced a few, non-technical, friends to FeedDemon and feeds in general and they are really struggling with this concept. We still have a long way to go before we really understand the social impacts of some of this technology. People have learnt how to scan a newspaper over hundreds of years, and I think that it’s a similar skill, we just need to help them realise that.

I use FeedDemon on a number of devices, depending on where I am sitting. The NewsGator synchronisation engine is great for keeping the feed list and read/unread status aligned. It’s not always perfect, but it’s close enough for me to be able to switch between machines with little impact.

I pondered for a little while how I should start this series of posts on the tools that I use. I only pondered for a little while, for some reason I settled quite quickly on the outlining capabilities with Microsoft Word.

Most of my working hours used to be spent editing reasonably large documents. A significant proportion of my time creating documentation. Many of these documents already have a defined structure, but I don’t think in linear defined structure, I think non-linearly. I have never written a document by starting at the beginning of the document and writing until I have finished, my brain just doesn’t work that way.

There are a lot of people who are exactly the same as me.

The information that I need to complete a documents is rarely available when that I start it. Most of the time it’s not until I start the document that I know what information I actually need.

These two major factors mean that it is inevitable that I work on different parts of the document at different times; adding something here, adding something there, moving something from one section to another section, adding new sections, removing sections.

When I work with other people I watch how they do things to see whether there is something I can learn. I’m always amazed at the small number who are using outlining.

I don’t know how I would cope without it, the alternative is lots and lots of scrolling.

Using Word Outlining

For those of you who don’t know what outlining is I thought I would give a short overview of how to use it.

Outlining mode in Word is accessed via the View controls in all version of Word.

Word then strips away all of the document formatting and gives you a structure of the document with each sub heading indented to show its level within the overall document.

You can open and close sections by clicking on the “+” and “-” at the start of each heading.

Sections are moved up and down a level by using the controls at the top of the screen (click on the arrows) or by using Tab (down a level) and Shift+Tab (up a level) with the cursor at the start of the heading.

To enter text inside the section, within the body, you need to choose the “Body Text” level alternatively you can use the incredibly useful key command CTRL+Shift+N. CTRL+Shift+N sets the paragraph style to be “Normal”.

The other really useful capability is the ability to only show sections at a particular level, do this by selecting from the drop down list in “Show Level”.

You can also drag and drop whole sections around the structure.

I find that keyboard shortcuts are really important for outlining because outlining is about the content and not about the style. Moving a mouse around takes away the focus, keyboard shortcuts retains the focus.

The outline viewing mode is very minimalist, more so in Word 2007 than any other, and this again helps to keep the focus on the content.

Sometimes when i am reviewing someone else’s document I view it into outline mode to see whether it tells the story from a structural perspective. It’s often the best way of noticing that whole sections are missing.

If you haven’t used outlining and you write documents, then you should.