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A WhizFolder Document

The picture shows a sample WhizFolder document showing many features. In this particular document, I keep all my notes on copy writing.

A WhizFolder document has two panes. The left pane shows the titles of the notes and the right pane shows the content of the selected note.

Since the list is hierarchial, it also represents the structure of the document. This helps you review your document faster as you look at the list first and then look at the contents as necessary by clicking on them. It also helps load a WhizFolder document very fast even if it contains thousands of notes.

You can have many such WhizFolder documents, one on each subject, keeping all the notes on that subject. Think of a WhizFolder document as a file type with the extension ".wzfolder" that you can keep anywhere and take with you on a portable disk to any other computer. Even other people who don't have WhizFolders can look at your documents with a freeware viewer available from WhizFolders web site.

Hyperlink to another note

You can insert a link in a note that goes to another related note. Such links help you later when you go to review these notes.

The top picture shows such a link to a note called "My note." It works just like the links in your Internet browser. But, in this case, you yourself can make up such links easily.

Such hyperlinks to other notes can be easily inserted by dragging a title from the note list on to a note editor. Or, you can even copy/paste a link from the list.

An Insert Wizard is also provided as shown in the second picture. There are numerous ways to enter links in WhizFolders. For more details, please see the actual right-click menus and the help file.

Hyperlinks to web sites, files and folders

When you type a web address in the note editor, it automatically becomes a link as shown in the top picture.

By using the insert wizard shown earlier, you can even insert links in the editor that open files and folders. The files are opened in their respective programs, for example, an excel file link will open the spreadsheet in Excel. What is the advantage? You can have notes along with the links to help you.

The note list can have links too. The second picture shows some links inserted in the topic list that can open the respective folders, files or web sites.

Use auto-pasting (Watch Clipboard) feature to collect useful information from the Internet and from your existing documents

Put on the "Watch clipboard" option for a document, and go on copying text or pictures from your browser or any other application. The corresponding notes will be added automatically in your WhizFolder document.

The picture shows the confirmation dialog that comes up before auto pasting. Here, using the Vista Snipping Tool, I copied a portion of a web page as a picture and WhizFolders immediately brought up the watch clipboard confirmation where I can change the name of the new item being added.

Brainstorm your ideas better with multiple window authoring

You can have multiple documents open on your desktop, each remembering its position for the next session. Use search engine like search on your notes. Search for words joined by "and, or." Copying multiple notes across different documents is easy. Just drag and drop or copy and paste the notes.

Searching for words

There are regular Find Text, Replace Text operations on the Search menu of a document. But, that's not what I want to show here.

In WhizFolders, you can also search all the notes in a document for many words just like in an Internet search engine. You can even specify complex conditions by separating the words with "and," "or," and "near." In this case, it will find notes containing all the given words (an "and"), one of the given words (an "or") or words quite close to each other (a "near").

This is called Advanced Search and can be peformed on a Search pane that opens from the right side as shown in the picture. The search gives a list of all the hits as shown. Moving the mouse over a hit shows the surrounding text in a balloon.

The main window of WhizFolders also allows this kind of search to be performed in all the listed WhizFolder documents.

Inserting OLE objects

WhizFolders note editor supports insertion of OLE objects quite similar to Windows Wordpad. You can even read about OLE objects in Wordpad help file. WhizFolders has superior features for inserting pictures as OLE objects. But I will show them in another screen shot.

With this Insert OLE feature you can use WhizFolders as a consolidated "viewer" for many types of different files, gathering them together into an organized project. At the same time, you can create, edit, and format, additional topics within WhizFolders itself. One topic might be text you create directly, whereas another topic might contain a jump link to a Web site. Yet another topic might be a link to a file located on your hard drive (or on a network drive), while a different topic might use an embedded object to show an existing graphic, spreadsheet, document, or other file.

The picture shows an embedded Microsoft Excel object in a WhizFolders Topic. See how Excel's menu comes up on WhizFolders editor window when you activate the spreadsheet.

Click here to read more about this feature on the weblog.

Assigning keyword tags to topics (available in the Deluxe Edition Only)

Sometimes, a topic may not actually contain the word that you want to associate with it.

For example, a topic may be related to “OLE Objects” but doesn’t have the actual words “OLE Objects” in it. So you can assign the custom keyword “OLE Objects” to all such topics by selecting them and right-clicking on the Assign Keywords operation.

A Keywords pane on the right shows all the keywords in this document. Click on the "Ole Objects" keyword and then click on Display. A list of topics associated with that keyword comes up from where you can display any of those topics.

Click here to read more about this feature on the weblog.

In case you are wondering why this screen shot is blue, it was captured when the Office Look and Feel theme was switched on for WhizFolders.

Inserting canned text with templates (available in the Deluxe Edition Only)

Many times you may want to reuse the text for another topic with some minor changes. Earlier, in the Pro version, you did this by copying topics via clipboard or drag and drop. But we have made this easier and more powerful with the use of “text templates.” You can set up a WhizFolder document to contain templates and then reference this document to insert boilerplate text in other documents.

The topics from this template document appear in a collapsible list on the right of the document as shown in the picture. Select any topic from the above list, and click on a button “Use.” This makes up the canned text from that topic and inserts it at the current editor position or as a new topic (if you are not editing).

Click here to read more about this feature on the weblog.

Zooming the Right Pane that shows the note contents

We have thought of accessibility features too. For example, you can zoom the text in the topics if you can't see it properly. This does not change the original font size. The picture shows a 150% zoom. Similarly, we have keyboard accessibility features so that you can assign your own keys to almost any operation. This is very useful for keyboard savvy users.

WhizFolder Viewer, A Freeware Reader that you can distribute with your notes

If you want to distribute your notes to others who don't have WhizFolders, they can read it with the freeware application, WhizFolder Viewer. You can give away the viewer with your notes. For more details, please see the WhizFolder Viewer page.

Make a self-running EBook

Going one step beyond the freeware viewer, you can even convert a WhizFolder document into a self-running e-book that we call EWhizBook. The picture shows such an EWhizBook I made.

How nice it would be if you can outline your ideas first in a list and later combine them to make a complete document.

WhizFolders is such a list-based outliner

What is Outlining? Outlining means arranging your thoughts or ideas in a particular sequence and in a hierarchy of topics and subtopics. Once you do that, working on a writing project becomes easier. Writers often make an outline of sections, chapters and subheadings first and then fill up the details later. WhizFolders makes it easy to outline the titles by drag and drop and other simple operations.

See the notes in the picture to understand what list-based outlining is all about.

WhizFolders also allows to combine this list of topics in a single big document for importing in your favorite word processor so that you can give finishing touches to it later. In other words, you will finish your writing project more quickly, if you make an outline in WhizFolders' topic list, fill up the details in rich text and then export the combined document to a word processor.

View Outline operation (Deluxe Edition Only)

WhizFolders primarily encourages the two-pane outlining which is more productive than outlining everything in one window. But, sometimes, you may want to see a complete outline to see how the document is progressing. The Deluxe edition of WhizFolders supports a "View Outline" operation that opens a popup window where you can see a list along with outlined text contents in the same list. The idea is to get a composite view of the document to see how it is progressing.

You can not do any editing or changes directly in this list but you can go to the editor of the selected topic or print a complete indented outline from here.

Although the Pro edition doesn't have the above feature, you can export the whole outline to an RTF file in Word outline format by using the Tools--Export menu.

Auto numbering

You can switch on the auto numbering for the outline list on the File Options--Appearance page. The items in the list are automatically numbered. The numbering is automatically maintained even when you rearrange the items.

Rich Text Editor (with Tables support)

In WhizFolders, there are two kinds of editors available. The Quick Editor that operates in the document window right-pane and the advanced editor in its own editor window, supporting tabbed editor pages. The picture shows such an advanced editor.

WhizFolders editor uses the same richedit control that Windows Wordpad uses. But WhizFolders has additional richtext editing features--nested list entries, insert picture wizard and so on.

WhizFolders editor can display tables very well. If you copy and paste tables from Microsoft Word or other word processors, they are close to the original. Also, the editing of the contents within table works well.

Table tool: For table designing, we have given a table tool that you can use if you don't have Microsoft Word. This tool works fine for designing tables except that it has certain limitations especially when modifying the design of the tables.

Check mark support

You can switch on the check mark support for the list on the File Options--Appearance page. This converts your outline in a task list so that you can keep track of the work done on the details of the items.

Hoisting feature (Deluxe Edition Only)

Hoisting means concentrating on only one branch of the outline and hiding the rest.

Here is how it works. You select the top level topic that you want to hoist. Then click on the menu View--Hoist as shown in the top picture.

As soon as you do that, all other topics are hidden as shown in the picture below it. Now you can work on the outline of only the topic that you selected. Afterwards, you click on View–-Unhide All to restore the full list of topics.

Hoisting is further improved in the latest version: In the new version, you can select a topic at any level and say "hoist all its children." This works much better than the feature in the current version where you must select the top level topic only.

A Concept Diagram showing an earlier version

A Concept Diagram showing an earlier version

Yet another Concept Diagram showing an earlier version

Print a nice book of your notes with automatic table of contents

This is actually an old screenshot with low quality. We will replace it with a new one soon.