Blog: WhizFolders, Articles and tips

In case you haven’t noticed, a new version of WhizFolders Deluxe edition is in Alpha testing where we are continuously adding great new features. This version is available from our self-service area for paid customers, support.whizfolders.com.

We just released Alpha 6.2.4 that completely revamps the hoisting feature. Now you can hoist any level. Hoisting means, you want to concentrate on a particular tree of notes and don’t want other topics to be visible to distract you. Here is an example, the following list of topics shows a list before hoisting.

Suppose, I want to concentrate on the topics underneath “The power of hyperlinks” to develop that outline further. So I select that topic and click on the menu “View–Hoist all child topics.” As soon as I do that, all other topics go away and I only see the topics that I want to work with. Here is a picture after hoisting.

This list exactly works like the full list. I can add more topics, move them around, print them, and so on. Even if I close this document, it remembers its hoisted status. When I finish working on this hoisted list, I can go back to the full list by the menu “View–Unhide All (unhoist).”

If you use WhizFolders for outlining and haven’t used hoisting, try it out. It makes the outlining process much more powerful.

Are there commands to split a topic and to merge 2 or more topics into one topic?

Merging is easy to do by copy and paste. There is no direct command to split but we have different ways to achieve it. More details follow.

Merging by Copy/Paste:

You need to select two or more topics in the list that you want to merge. Then copy them to the clipboard. Now create a new topic, start the editor on it and do a paste. This will paste the merged contents. There is an option to include the topic names of the selected topics too in the merged contents. You can see this option on the Edit menu, “Include topic names too in above operation(s).”

Let me give you an example:

1. I select 3 topics to merge in the list of Topics, named, “Branch,” “Integration,” and “Release/” I copy them to the clipboard by the Keys “Ctrl + C” or by using the copy button on the toolbar.
    
2. I create a new topic “Merge,” open this topic in the advanced editor, and paste.

   The text from the 3 topics gets copied in a single topic as shown in the picture:

   

You can even do the paste in a word processor document to get the merged content.

Merging by Export:

Instead of copy/paste, you can also export the merged content to an RTF file or to an RTF file in the Word outline format. Just select the topics that you want to merge in the same way. Then use one of the operations on the menu “Tools–Export” to create the desired RTF file.

Splitting a big topic or a word processor document in multiple topics:

This is described in another Blog article, Breaking up a large Word document into topics.

Importing and splitting an external big text file into multiple topics:

Suppose you have a large text file outside WhizFolders and you want to split it into multiple topics. You need to first understand how you are going to indicate to WhizFolders at what positions the text needs to be split. If the text file already has a repeating fixed word or phrase before each text block that you want to make into a topic then your job is easy. But first let’s take a case where no such repeating fixed word or phrase exists as in the following example.

• To tell WhizFolders where the splitting should occur, I open the big text file in a text editor like Notepad/Wordpad and insert a fixed word “Split” in many places in the file as shown below.

Split
BRANCH
A] Committing the Code changes into the Branch
Activity ID:  Desc:
Remarks:  

Split
INEGRATION
B] Committing the Branch into the Torch
Task ID:  [Branch Name: , Revision No: ] Desc:
Remarks:  

Split
RELEASE
D] Doing the release of the application through 'Release' folder
Release Name: : [Revision No: ]
Tasks Integrated:
Task ID:  [Branch Name: , Revision No: ] Desc:

• Now I go to the WhizFolder document in which I want to insert the topics from this text file and click on the menu “Insert–Topics from a text file…”
• A file selection dialog comes up where I select this text file that I prepared.
• Now WhizFolders asks me for a topic prefix that means the fixed word or phrase that appears before each topic in the text file. In the above case, the prefix is “split” and I type it in and click on OK.
• WhizFolders then imports the text file, splitting it at the fixed word shown to make many topics. Please see the following picture.

Note that the topic names were made up from the next line after the “Split” that I inserted. I could have given my own names to these topics by entering “Split: a topic name” instead. Then the topic prefix that I would specify to WhizFolders would be “Split: “.

Let’s take another example. Let’s say you want to export a number of email messages in your email software to a single text file and then want to import them in WhizFolders, each as a separate topic. If you select a number of email messages in your email software and save them together in a text file, you might get a fixed word automatically depending on the email software and its features. For example, each email message would begin with “FROM: “. In this case, you don’t need to edit the text file to insert your own topic prefix. You can simply tell WhizFolders to use the topic prefix “FROM: ” when importing that text file and it will make a topic out of each email message. But the topic names would be made from whatever text follows the FROM: on that line.

If you know any kind of programming, you can make quite interesting WhizFolder documents this way. For example, one WhizFolders user wrote a script to generate a text file containing a calendar event notebook for the whole year. In the script, he could generate a proper topic prefix and the name he wanted to give to these topics. The resulting event files are very useful and can be found at the bottom of the Calendar page on this web site. You can download a file from there and use it in WhizFolders.

We have released a new flash demo on Outlining Features. Please see the Demos section of whizfolders.com. We have also made some improvements on how the demos and screenshots are shown. If you notice any problems, please let us know.

When editing a topic name you can always press F4 or F5 to insert date or date/time (the same keys as in topic editor).

It is also possible to automatically include date and time in a new topic name for a document by setting that up in the File Options. Here is a concrete example:

• You must have noticed that by default, when you create a new topic, the topic name generated is “New Topic”.
• Now click on the menu “Tools–File options.”
• Click on the “New Topics” Tab and look at the pull-down list “Start a New topic name with” that gives you various options.
• Choose the option “Date” to automatically prefix new topic names with date.
• Click OK.
• Now add a new topic to this document. You will notice that the date is automatically prefixed and the selection allows you to type a name beyond it. How convenient!

This feature allows you to set up a document as a journal or a time log. You can also look at other options available on the above pull down. For instance, you can also have custom characters put before or after the topic name.

Question: How do I select multiple topics for a move or printing operation?

Use the same keyboard combination that you use in Windows Explorer for selecting multiple files. For example, press Ctrl when you click on other topics to include or exclude them.

Similarly, to select a range of topics, select the topic at one end, then press Shift and click on the topic at the other end of the range.

Question: How do I copy a topic from one WhizFolder document to another?

There are two ways to do it–copy and paste the topics, or drag and drop them to the new document. Note that the subtopics are copied automatically when you do that.

Question: I just accidentally deleted a topic, but haven’t closed the program. Any way to restore it?

Use “Recover recently deleted topics” on the Edit menu of the document window. However, this will work only in the same session. It will not work if you closed and reopened the document.

There is a similar feature in editor window too. If you changed the text of a topic and then changed your mind, DON’T close the window or save the document. Instead, use the operation “Undo all changes since last save” on the edit menu.

In general, it is a good idea to regularly back up your documents. We have made this very easy in the new version by giving a backup button. There are many backup features to keep multiple copies of your documents, for each day.

You can do it in two ways:

1) Select a topic and drag it to a target place in the list and
press CTRL so that the cursor changes to ‘+’. Drop it and it will
create a duplicate along with its children.

Or,

2) Copy the topic to the clipboard and paste.

The nice thing is that these methods allow you to copy topics to another document too. Also, the child topics are automatically copied with the parent.