Organizing and Editing Work

Question

Crashed my old computer and using my husbands MacBook. Really thought I would get one too until I tried I Works. Apparently, it is great for all kinds of fancy stuff but I just write novels. For that, it is so terribly clumsy - editing, dictionary, thesaurus take multiple steps. A real nuisance.
Also, have so much work that would be best grouped. How can I, say, create a file for one of my books then have everything relevant filed together? And another file for research? Instead I have to search through stacks and, trust me, there are a lot of files to search through.
Any suggestions or should I just go back to a pc?

Answer 1

I was thinking about your needs to bundle files and research.
There are so many ways you can sort this out for yourself given a little thought, it is hard to know where to start.
There are however some Mac OSX tools which would be helpful in whatever you do.
*DEVONthink Pro 2.0b5* might be right up your alley, give it a try:
http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/18510/devonthink-pro
SpotLight, up in the top right of your menubar, combined with keywords, notes or comments in your files hunts very quickly through all your material.
CoverFlow, see the windowbar in Finder, is the 4th way to look at your files in OSX. It lets you preview and sort your files without opening them.
Finder has 7 different ways of viewing and sorting your files of which you can use Comments to make an arbitrary method of your own.
Labels is one of the Finder view methods and lets you color and sort your files by whatever relevance you choose and I have found countless uses for this.
Automator lets you set up sequences of mundane tasks for the computer to execute.
iPhoto lets you use Stacks/Smart Stacks to quickly sort through your images according to your own criteria.
PDFs are freely generated and viewable everywhere in Mac OSX.
Clippings are snippets of text or images that you drag to your desktop or wherever, are readily viewable with a double click, and can easily be dragged back into documents.
Spaces creates several desktops for your work, you can have one set up just for your writing and another for your research and you can switch between them to keep a clean and handy work area. I extend this functionality with HyperSpaces which adds a few more tricks.
PTHPasteboard collects things you have copied or cut in a previewable panel that pops out of the side of your screen, and with one click these are sorted and inserted wherever you want them.
*Default Folder* keeps all your material exactly where you want it and accessible directly via Open and Save.
*Big Mean Folder Machine* can automatically sort your material into files/folders according to preset categories.
Papers lets you collect and use your .pdfs and others as a research library.
Qu-s is a beautiful enhancement to your desktop. I love it and use it to organise my work and keep me on task. They are super postit notes, which you can readily call up and edit and check off and sort tasks, but when you are finished they become part of your desktop background. Best seen to appreciate how good they look and how functional they are.
These are just the tip of the iceberg of things I find useful to do my work. You no doubt will discover many more for yourself that will suit your style of work. Don't think your brief acquaintance with the Mac was any more than just that.
Peter