How i*write™
can help you maintain a professional journal
It is simple to enter and format text
There is nothing new to
learn here. You can enter and format text as you are used to from
your word processing program. It is easy to structure information
visually by applying text styles, colors, indentation, bullets and
so on. You can also drag & drop text within the journal or
from other programs into the journal. For example, drag a message
from Outlook Express into i*write : it couldn't be easier.
You can easily organize your information
You can define as many categories
as you like but i*write does not force you to use all categories on every day. In
other words, only if you explicitly create a category item for a
particular day will this category appear for that day. You don't
have to carry around the unnecessary baggage of empty category
tabs.
A second way to stay
organized is to use multiple journals. Create a journal for
every project or every customer. Keep a private journal and a
business journal and so on. You'll have to strike a balance
between having too many categories in any one journal and having
too many different journals. There are no general solutions to
this question. A sensible thing to do would be to start with two
journals: a private and a professional one. As the number of
categories per journal increases you can always decide to start a
new specialized journal.
You can quickly find what you wrote even if it was years ago
In our experience, people who give up
journal-writing do so mostly because they cannot find relevant
information in their journals once they have entered more than a
trivial amount of text. Of course, using categories and multiple
journals can go a long way when it comes to knowing where to look
for information.
But no matter how well thought out your
structure of journals and categories may be, you will always come
to a point where you just cannot remember in which category you
put some piece of information. Also, the number of items in a
category may become fairly large after some time so it's a pain to
sequentially browse through all items.
This is where i*write excels: you will
find that its full-text search capabilities are unmatched. Not
only can you search using logical connectors such as AND
and
OR; you can also perform natural language searches; use stemming
and phonic searching; or restrict the search to date and category
ranges. In conjunction with the thesaurus,
i*write will find misspelled words and even
related concepts and synonyms.
You get powerful tools for viewing and browsing the
information in your journal
Most of the time you will be working with
your journal one day at a time. For example you may keep the
journal open during your workday and make several entries for the
current date. Maybe you go back a day to look at what you wrote
yesterday or you make a To Do ...
entry for tomorrow.
However, sometimes you're more interested in
what you had to say regarding a particular category. Maybe you
want to look up all ideas you ever wrote down. In this case
you would switch to Category View
and select Ideas from the Category
list. Now you could browse through all Idea
entries. This is much more convenient than searching for Idea
items in Date View because
you would have to check every single day and there might be weeks
or even months where you never made an Idea
entry.
Sometimes you want to work with a specific
set of days (or categories) because they contain information
that's relevant in a common context. Those days may be far apart
in the journal but in i*write you can open
them all as individual tabs so you can switch between them with a
single mouse click. i*write even remembers
which days were open when you quit the program and opens them the
next time you start your journal.
Commands are accessible via toolbar buttons
and shortcut keys making navigation easy for beginners and,
at the same time, efficient for advanced users. |
