What word processing, bibliographic, note taking programs do you use?
Early in my PhD program, I started using Nota Bene, an integrated program for academic research and writing. It was lifesaver, especially for researching and writing my dissertation. I've been out of the academic environment for several years, but my NB remains useful for my research and writing in the church. I've thought on occasion, though, about moving to another program or set of programs which may work more seamlessly with Logos. Nota Bene is a superior program, but it is a small company producing a niche product. The current release of NB is a 16-bit program, and I have to run it in the Window Virtual PC in my 64-bit Lenovo ThinkPad.
NB has been working on a 32-bit iteration, and it will probably be released within a couple of months and will cost $99 to upgrade. Before I sink another $99 into the program, though, I thought I would see what other options I may have. I may discover that I have the best available. This is where you Logos comrades come in. 
What do you use? Any suggestions?
And Mac users--please chime in. I may move everything over to Apple one day.
Thanks.
Pastor, Cornerstone Baptist Church, Clinton, SC
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I use Endnote in combination with Microsoft Word 2010. That works very well for me. I find it far more powerful and intuitive than Notabene. It doesn't integrate with Logos in any way, but I don't really need it to.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Bill Moore said:
NB has been working on a 32-bit iteration, and it will probably be released within a couple of months and will cost $99 to upgrade.
I bought Nota Bene second hand from a South African Bishop several years ago. He gave me an incredible bargain on it. I looked at Endnote but saw no need to switch. If I am ever to be convinced to upgrade NB, they will have to offer significant new features to reel me in. As for wordprocessing and notes: Microsoft Office 2010 and OneNote. (I found I use Excel often.)
Now, I will check out Nota Bene's new features.[8-|]
one more thing Bill; I am not impressed with MS Office for Mac. It is far shy of the Windows version. There has got to be a better wordprocessor for Mac.
Logos 7 Collectors Edition
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Mark Barnes said:
I use Endnote in combination with Microsoft Word 2010. That works very well for me. I find it far more powerful and intuitive than Notabene. It doesn't integrate with Logos in any way, but I don't really need it to.
Thanks, Mark. I've not used MS Word 2010. I started out with WordPerfect in the late 1980's and never went to Word because of its lack of reveal codes. NB's reveal codes is WP on steroids. [;)] But it is interesting that you find Word and Endnote more powerful than NB. Would you mind elaborating on that?
By integrating with Logos, I was mainly referring to the extra step required to copy verses from Logos to NB. With MS Word and several other options, one can have the verse or passage directly sent to the program from Logos. With NB, you have to paste it. Not a big deal, but it is another step.
Pastor, Cornerstone Baptist Church, Clinton, SC
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Super Tramp said:Bill Moore said:
NB has been working on a 32-bit iteration, and it will probably be released within a couple of months and will cost $99 to upgrade.
I bought Nota Bene second hand from a South African Bishop several years ago. He gave me an incredible bargain on it. I looked at Endnote but saw no need to switch. If I am ever to be convinced to upgrade NB, they will have to offer significant new features to reel me in. As for wordprocessing and notes: Microsoft Office 2010 and OneNote. (I found I use Excel often.)
Now, I will check out Nota Bene's new features.
one more thing Bill; I am not impressed with MS Office for Mac. It is far shy of the Windows version. There has got to be a better wordprocessor for Mac.
Thanks, Matthew. The upgrade is $99 from version 9 and $199, if memory serves, from version 8. If you have an earlier version than 8, the price may make upgrading too pricey for the benefit.
I will look into OneNote.
Pastor, Cornerstone Baptist Church, Clinton, SC
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Bill Moore said:
But it is interesting that you find Word and Endnote more powerful than NB.
I've made by software choice a number of years ago, so haven't used NB9. The core NB functions are NOT more powerful in Word/Endnote. In fact, NB probably still has the edge. But beyond the core, MS Word clearly has the edge. There are so many functions that I use beyond that (including integration with other software) than NB can't touch. I'm not willing to sacrifice all that for a minimal benefit in bibliographic functionality. Just as a minor example, NB won't render images, but only supports OLE. Now, OK you can get around that, so its not a show-stopper - but there are dozens of examples like that, and cumulatively they matter to me. Have you seen the advice given for JPEGs in Nota Bene's manual?
…although you can view a JPEG file on most systems (because Explorer lets you do so), some people do not have JPEG editors installed, so they cannot directly include them in NB files. However, if you do want to insert a JPEG or GIF image, for example, but you don't have an OLE server for that kind of file, there is a way around this problem… if you have Microsoft Word on your system, you can create a Word document that contains just that image (since Word does some of this rendering itself, not calling on the other program), and save it as a Word file with a .DOC extension. Then, in NB, you can include, that Word document or Photoshop image instead of the original file.
Now I'm sure you don't do that, and JPEGs work just fine, but the point is simply that NB lacks critical core functionality that I need, and although its very good at bibliographic stuff, I'm not willing to accept its lack of functionality in areas like this.
This is my personal Faithlife account. On 1 March 2022, I started working for Faithlife, and have a new 'official' user account. Posts on this account shouldn't be taken as official Faithlife views!
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Mark Barnes said:Bill Moore said:
But it is interesting that you find Word and Endnote more powerful than NB.
I've made by software choice a number of years ago, so haven't used NB9. The core NB functions are NOT more powerful in Word/Endnote. In fact, NB probably still has the edge. But beyond the core, MS Word clearly has the edge. There are so many functions that I use beyond that (including integration with other software) than NB can't touch. I'm not willing to sacrifice all that for a minimal benefit in bibliographic functionality. Just as a minor example, NB won't render images, but only supports OLE. Now, OK you can get around that, so its not a show-stopper - but there are dozens of examples like that, and cumulatively they matter to me. Have you seen the advice given for JPEGs in Nota Bene's manual?
…although you can view a JPEG file on most systems (because Explorer lets you do so), some people do not have JPEG editors installed, so they cannot directly include them in NB files. However, if you do want to insert a JPEG or GIF image, for example, but you don't have an OLE server for that kind of file, there is a way around this problem… if you have Microsoft Word on your system, you can create a Word document that contains just that image (since Word does some of this rendering itself, not calling on the other program), and save it as a Word file with a .DOC extension. Then, in NB, you can include, that Word document or Photoshop image instead of the original file.
Now I'm sure you don't do that, and JPEGs work just fine, but the point is simply that NB lacks critical core functionality that I need, and although its very good at bibliographic stuff, I'm not willing to accept its lack of functionality in areas like this.
Thanks. Yes, that's the sort of thing that has me looking elsewhere. As a general word processing program, NB is behind the curve, or so it seems to me.
Pastor, Cornerstone Baptist Church, Clinton, SC
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Super Tramp said:
I am not impressed with MS Office for Mac. It is far shy of the Windows version. There has got to be a better wordprocessor for Mac.
LibreOffice is free, which has international language option for Right to Left textual direction.
Mellel has often been mentioned, including Logos User Voice suggestion => add Mellel support for "Copy Bible Verses" (currently has 26 votes)
Scrivener is another writing tool to consider for Mac (and PC) => http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php?platform=mac
Keep Smiling [:)]
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I haven't used NB or EndNote, but have used Zotero, which also has plugins for several Word Processors. I use it with Word, and it works fine. It has the advantage of being Open Source, and therefore costs nothing. It handles all the normal bibliographic & citation formats, and you can import book/journal, etc details into it from online library catalogues or Amazon. Worth trying, both on PC and Mac. Only other point is that it only works with Firefox browsers. You can find it at www.zotero.org.
Running Logos 6 Platinum and Logos Now on Surface Pro 4, 8 GB RAM, 256GB SSD, i5
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For word-processing I use Word. I can't imagine using anything else. I helped write it, so I guess I'm kind of biased. [:)]
For bibliographies I use Zotero some of the time, though I haven't converted over completely to using it. I still have my main research bibliography (on faith and technology) in Word. It's more work to add each new entry I discover to it than it would be in Zotero, but the barrier of converting it all to Zotero is too high for me.
For quick and dirty note-taking when I'm out and about with my tablet, I use Evernote. Otherwise I use Word for that too.
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Rosie Perera said:
For word-processing I use Word. I can't imagine using anything else. I helped write it, so I guess I'm kind of biased.
So why didn't you write a reveal-codes feature? [;)]
Seriously, Rosie, I'm impressed. Perhaps I need to give Word another look, though I'm hesitant to buy it now with Word 2012 coming out sometime next year.
Rosie Perera said:For bibliographies I use Zotero some of the time, though I haven't converted over completely to using it. I still have my main research bibliography (on faith and technology) in Word. It's more work to add each new entry I discover to it than it would be in Zotero, but the barrier of converting it all to Zotero is too high for me.
For quick and dirty note-taking when I'm out and about with my tablet, I use Evernote. Otherwise I use Word for that too.
The nice thing about NB's bibliographic component, Ibidem, is that you enter the documentation information once. After that, you merely enter the page number for the particular reference. I suspect that's the way EndNote works. What about Zotero. That seems a whole different animal.
Pastor, Cornerstone Baptist Church, Clinton, SC
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Bill Moore said:
The nice thing about NB's bibliographic component, Ibidem, is that you enter the documentation information once. After that, you merely enter the page number for the particular reference. I suspect that's the way EndNote works. What about Zotero.
With Zotero, you also only enter up the documentation info once, then just enter the page number for each citation. It's worth downloading and having a play, as it doesn't cost you anything. You need to download Zotero and the word processor plugin separately, and you need a supported version of Firefox before you can install Zotero itself. You can also download free plugins for some of the more specialist citation formats.
Running Logos 6 Platinum and Logos Now on Surface Pro 4, 8 GB RAM, 256GB SSD, i5
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I've started to reuse Microsoft Word for Mac. This is purely because if I write anything now, I want to be able to tag and compile it into a personal books as well. If Pages could save as a .docx that would be my preference.
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Bill Moore said:
What do you use?
I use a combo of Word's outlining & word processing functions. I flip back & forth through them. Why?
When I'm taking notes, I'm also thinking about publication, & I find the outlining to be a VERY handy way of building my TOC from the ground up. And it helps to organize my thinking by doing it that way....
BLessings on your choice.
Grace & Peace,
Bill
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Greg, Philana, and Bill--thanks for the input. Very interesting about Zotero. I'll definitely look into it.
I could perhaps start using LibreOffice, save everything as .doc files, and then switch to MS Office when the 2012 version is released. It's tough living with such a cheapskate. [:)]
Pastor, Cornerstone Baptist Church, Clinton, SC
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I'm on Mac and use DevonThink. It has an academic following and is very powerful.
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Bill Moore said:Rosie Perera said:
For word-processing I use Word. I can't imagine using anything else. I helped write it, so I guess I'm kind of biased.
So why didn't you write a reveal-codes feature?
Heh, heh. The main original reason for Wordperfect's reveal-codes feature was that formatting was always getting screwed up and you needed a way to see the internal codes so you could fix it. Word didn't store its formatting as a stream of on/off codes like Wordperfect did, so there were no codes hidden in the text which we could reveal. We instead stored in a table the offsets where formatting was applied. That made some things easier for us, and faster, and smaller. But it meant a proprietary document file format which didn't win us friends. Word has since converted to using an XML file format which does have on/off formatting codes hidden in it. I still don't think they have a way to reveal the XML and let you edit it directly within the UI (I think the feeling is that users could shoot themselves in the foot if they did that), but if you know what you're doing you can dig down into the .docx file, treat it like a zip file, unzip it, and see the XML codes.Bill Moore said:Rosie Perera said:For bibliographies I use Zotero some of the time, though I haven't converted over completely to using it. I still have my main research bibliography (on faith and technology) in Word. It's more work to add each new entry I discover to it than it would be in Zotero, but the barrier of converting it all to Zotero is too high for me.
For quick and dirty note-taking when I'm out and about with my tablet, I use Evernote. Otherwise I use Word for that too.
The nice thing about NB's bibliographic component, Ibidem, is that you enter the documentation information once. After that, you merely enter the page number for the particular reference. I suspect that's the way EndNote works. What about Zotero. That seems a whole different animal.
The thing I like about Zotero is you can point your browser at any web page that has bibliographic information for a book or article (e.g., Google Books, Amazon.com, worldcat.org) click a button, and that info will be imported into your database automatically into the proper fields. It's super easy. So as you're browsing around doing research online you can be building up a hefty bibliography without hardly a thought. Creating a footnote to enter into your word processor is pretty easy too, just right click on the source, choose a command, select the output format you want (e.g., Chicago Manual of Style, and once you've selected it, your choice is remembered for the future so you don't have to do this step again), and OK and it's copied to the clipboard. I haven't spent much time working on documents with footnotes and bibliographies generated from Zotero so I can't tell you how easy it feels in real practice. But neither have I used any competitor to compare it with.
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GregW said:
Only other point is that it only works with Firefox browsers. You can find it at www.zotero.org.
Zotero has in beta a version that is not Firefox dependent. It does not automate importing bibliographies from books where I would like to see at least as much "importing" as recipe programs. It is a solid program. I keep my notes in Logos for reasons directly related to my use of them ... but I am not satisfied with their features.
Orthodox Bishop Alfeyev: "To be a theologian means to have experience of a personal encounter with God through prayer and worship."; Orthodox proverb: "We know where the Church is, we do not know where it is not."
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Rosie Perera said:
Heh, heh. The main original reason for Wordperfect's reveal-codes feature was that formatting was always getting screwed up and you needed a way to see the internal codes so you could fix it. Word didn't store its formatting as a stream of on/off codes like Wordperfect did, so there were no codes hidden in the text which we could reveal. We instead stored in a table the offsets where formatting was applied. That made some things easier for us, and faster, and smaller. But it meant a proprietary document file format which didn't win us friends. Word has since converted to using an XML file format which does have on/off formatting codes hidden in it. I still don't think they have a way to reveal the XML and let you edit it directly within the UI (I think the feeling is that users could shoot themselves in the foot if they did that), but if you know what you're doing you can dig down into the .docx file, treat it like a zip file, unzip it, and see the XML codes.I was one of those friends that you did not make, but if I had known what was going on, I may have converted to friend-status. [;)]
[quote] The thing I like about Zotero is you can point your browser at any web page that has bibliographic information for a book or article (e.g., Google Books, Amazon.com, worldcat.org) click a button, and that info will be imported into your database automatically into the proper fields. It's super easy. So as you're browsing around doing research online you can be building up a hefty bibliography without hardly a thought. Creating a footnote to enter into your word processor is pretty easy too, just right click on the source, choose a command, select the output format you want (e.g., Chicago Manual of Style, and once you've selected it, your choice is remembered for the future so you don't have to do this step again), and OK and it's copied to the clipboard. I haven't spent much time working on documents with footnotes and bibliographies generated from Zotero so I can't tell you how easy it feels in real practice. But neither have I used any competitor to compare it with.
You are giving me something to think about. I've wondered how well Nota Bene is going to keep up with the increasingly automated and integrated advances in research and writing and have wondered if it will be relegated to an application for a dwindling niche community. Word and Zotero may be the way to go for a while. Thanks, Rosie, for your input.
Pastor, Cornerstone Baptist Church, Clinton, SC
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Philana Crouch said:
I've started to reuse Microsoft Word for Mac. This is purely because if I write anything now, I want to be able to tag and compile it into a personal books as well. If Pages could save as a .docx that would be my preference.
You can save Pages as a .doc file and then open it in MS and save it as a .docx
I know it's an extra step or two but I prefer pages as well 0 -
Alexander Longacre said:Philana Crouch said:
I've started to reuse Microsoft Word for Mac. This is purely because if I write anything now, I want to be able to tag and compile it into a personal books as well. If Pages could save as a .docx that would be my preference.
You can save Pages as a .doc file and then open it in MS and save it as a .docx
I know it's an extra step or two but I prefer pages as well LibreOffice also can open .doc and save as .docx
Unfortunately, Microsoft extended some Office capabilities on Mac so can create/edit on Mac that looks lousy on PC (cross platform capability has some opportunities for improvement). Also, Microsoft Word on Mac is text directionally challenged; left to right is fine, but not right to left. If want to edit Hebrew on Mac, Mellel has been recommended in many forum replies.
Keep Smiling [:)]
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Take a look at Citavi.
In my opinion, it is the state of the art program for reference management and knowledge organization - and I've tried a lot: Mendeley, One Note, Nota Bene, EndNote, Zotero ...
While always clear and easy to use, it always surprises me to see there's virtually nothing that can't be done with it (at least nothing I want to do).
"Mach's wie Gott - werde Mensch!" | theolobias.de
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I absolutely love the feel and style of Apple's Pages. I wish I was able to make it my main word processor but I can't! This is because Pages does not have a quick synonym look-up and replacement feature. This is my favorite word processor feature. Because of this single issue I must use MS Word.
Does anyone know when Pages is getting updated? It's been years!
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Theolobias said:
Take a look at Citavi.
In my opinion, it is the state of the art program for reference management and knowledge organization - and I've tried a lot: Mendeley, One Note, Nota Bene, EndNote, Zotero ...
While always clear and easy to use, it always surprises me to see there's virtually nothing that can't be done with it (at least nothing I want to do).
Thanks. I had not heard of Citavi. How high is the learning curve? After having had NB for almost a decade, I'm looking for something relatively simple that I can run on a 64-bit computer.
Pastor, Cornerstone Baptist Church, Clinton, SC
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Bill Moore said:
How high is the learning curve?
It's quite easy to learn, since it's very intuitive and comes with a clear and appealing user interface. Yet, it's extremeley powerful. It's Freeware as long as you don't want to set up a project with more than 100 bibliographical entries, so you can try it in detail. For projects bigger than that, however, you have to buy a licence.
"Mach's wie Gott - werde Mensch!" | theolobias.de
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Theolobias said:
It's quite easy to learn, since it's very intuitive and comes with a clear and appealing user interface. Yet, it's extremeley powerful. It's Freeware as long as you don't want to set up a project with more than 100 bibliographical entries, so you can try it in detail. For projects bigger than that, however, you have to buy a licence.
Citavi is basically everything but a word processing program, right? If so, what word processor do you use with it?
Pastor, Cornerstone Baptist Church, Clinton, SC
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Bill Moore said:
Citavi is basically everything but a word processing program, right?
Yes, but you can easily manage excerpts and quotations and build abstracts and outlines by bringing them together. So it's kind of a pre- word processor.
Bill Moore said:If so, what word processor do you use with it?
I have Microsoft Word 2007. Citavi can export data in several formats quite easily to Word - I don't know about other programs, though.
"Mach's wie Gott - werde Mensch!" | theolobias.de
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