InfoQube IM - Community

Submitted by markfoley on 2008/11/17 23:51

Hi,

I've had a quick look at forms and am wondering if anyone does use them for 'quick data entry' type stuff. Tabbing doesn't move you to the next field for example, you have to cursor down or use the mouse. And in relation to outlining I can't really see how I'd control where the item appears.

Anyway, if anyone is actively using them please describe how you use them, when you're outlining or taking notes.

Thanks!

Comments

I don’t see this as very useful in its current form. IMO, forms can be great if they have at least the following:

Templates assigned to forms, with attributes/properties pre-defined. (But editable).
Ability, as you mentioned, Mark, to add items quickly with minimal duplication required for like items.

Plus, the "Manage Forms" link needs to be moved to the Tools menu instead of the View menu.

Jim

Forms have predefined values
There are icons to add an item and a sub-item, right next to the form

>Tools menu: Yes, this is possible. You can do it yourself by customizing the menu (right-click on a toolbar>customize, drag-drop)

I use them quite a bit, in particular because they can automatically assign field values. You can:

Add an item at the same level as the current
Add a sub-item
Or simply apply the form values to the current item

Unlike the grid, which has a single set of field displayed (as columns), you can open/close any form

For example, you want to log that you called a contact, you:

Open the AddressBook grid
Find your contact
CTRL-T to dial the phone number (will propose the list of phone number of this contact or of parents of)
Open the Call form
While still on the contact, click the icon to create a sub-item Call
Use F4 to toggle between the form and the grid if desired
While talking, you may want to create a task for you. Use the Todo form, etc

Thanks for the example Pierre. It seems interesting, I went through the example you mentioned.

I guess the confusion for me is still around the 'rapid entry' (I don't think I could use them in a meeting so sticky values in the outliner grid would be more appropriate for me) and also I can't see where the todo will end up in the todo grid (ie in a certain spot in the tree)

Thanks

Information management is always a compromize between free-form and structured. Free-form is quicker to enter, but structured allows for analysis, automatic re-organisation.

On a phone call, when time is important, I tend to put most info in the item text and in sub-items e.g. unstructured. When I hang up, I'll transfer some of this info in fields, some will stay as text.

As a means to bridge the 2 worlds, item text processing (into field values) is planned. Examples of this is Google Calendar. Enter dates and times in the appt text and it will fill the date fields. For example, you'd enter on:Tom by:tomorrow and it would put an action on Tom, due tomorrow

So this is planned and actually simple to implement (just so many things to do

)

The forms are not the solutions to all problems of course, and entering stuff in the grid is still quicker, provided, the number of columns is not too large. I see grid columns and forms as complementary.

As for creating the todo and how it would show up in the todo grid, I'll post a blog on the subject as it is the core concept behind IQ.

Great, I'll look forward to that blog entry. It's an interesting mindset you need to adopt for SQLnotes. Like with your 'welcome grid' you've used a field called 'welcome' from memory to define what lives in that grid. However in practical use, you wouldn't want a new field every time you had a meeting for example. So I'm just working through in my head the best way to do that data wise. If you get a chance to blog on some more real life situations like the 'phone call' one above, it'd be really useful I think.

The idea of having tags define other field values is a great one. Tou'd have lists of these consisting of "Tag/Prefix" and "Data" that follows it. You could have named sets of these, eg "GTD" and other similar sets. Also clever stuff around converting the text that follows- eg a date might be "March 12" or "12/10/08" or even "Next Monday" which could be parsed based on the date the note was created.

Similarly you could do under the same feature is define 'synonyms' for searching purposes. Sometimes you might call bob foley "BF" or "Bob F" or just "Bob" but when you search you really want any one of those.

That links off to the interesting idea of a 'semantic search' where you can define concepts in a tree, you've probably heard of it. You would for example have a tree like:

vehicles

...cars

......volkswagen

......ford

.........ford falcon

...trucks

...etc

Then if you searched for something including 'cars' it would also return those referring to ford's because a ford is a type of car.

I've always thought deriving a large semantic tree from freeform web text would be a great project to do to support AI and other things- but it's beyond my capability! More for the realm of google - but you could probably include such a tree simply enough into IQ later down the track.

Cheers mate