I was not aware that Scrivener could not handle large amounts of data. That would certainly be a problem for someone with lots of research material. I will have to look at your recommendation DevonThink Pro. I’m always open to new tools to make writing easier.

For now I’m content to use my OpenOffice (for Mac) word processor. It has all the functionality of MS Word and I can fire it up and just start typing. As I mentioned in the post, most of my notes and outlines are handwritten. That’s just how I work.

Definitely look into using NeoOffice (for PC). The word processor is great and because it’s open source, the program is always being improved and updated. Best of all…it’s free!

Thanks again for your comment and I hope to see you around Brad’s Reader again!

-Brad

So my primary writing tool is actually a project management tool: DevonThink Pro (http://www.devon-technologies.com/products/devonthink/index.html). It’s quite ugly (though far less ugly since it’s recent redesign), but it is an absolute workhorse when it comes to organizing information, archiving web pages (which for my purposes is a necessity), compiling different media documents together in one place. The actual word processor part of DevonThink is terrible: it has no real understanding of formatting pages or layout. But it is indestructible in terms of data capacity, so it’s a great place to throw together notes and write early drafts when the look of the content doesn’t matter yet. I usually write the first few drafts of a piece in DevonThink, then once I feel like I’m entering a middle stage where seeing the work properly on the page would help and I don’t need to reference research documents as often, I switch over to Word or Scrivener. DevonThink also has a really good search function.

Thanks for the recommendation of NeoOffice: always nice to have Word alternatives. If only DevonThink had a true word processor integrated into it, I would use it for everything.