Are you frustrated by ECCO?

Are you convinced that there's power lurking somewhere in this strange tool that you haven't been able to unlock?

Do you wonder how PC Magazine and other respected industry magazines can continue to give this obtuse product top ratings?

Do you scratch your head when some items your notepads turn up green? Or when you "outdent" the subitems under these green items - and the green items disappear?

If you are, read on.

Adapted from "Folders - the essence of ECCO, Part 1" an article in the September 1995 issue of Easy ECCO.

ECCO confusion and ECCO enlightenment

When I started to work with ECCO, I was terribly confused for the longest time about the relationships between items, folders, outlines, views, and columns. When I finally figured out the roles of all these elements of the ECCO environment, the "light went on" for me, and ECCO became a much more valuable tool.

Folders are the key to understanding ECCO

In my opinion (and I think it's accurate to say that this opinion is shared by a lot of people who have struggled through to ECCO enlightenment), to get really comfortable with ECCO, you need a thorough grounding in ECCO folders.

In the course of this article, you'll see a number of related concepts-items, views, subitems, columns, context parents-and how they relate to folders.

Data and the user interface

Really effective ECCO files are files that are based on the data that is to be stored and on the relationships between the different pieces of data.The data, of course, consists of the information you store in ECCO. If you organize your ECCO data in a logical and systematic way, your file stands the best chance of being easy to use (both for you and for anyone else who needs to use it). You'll probably also find that when you need to add additional functionality to the file, a data-oriented design provides the greatest degree of flexibility.

• The data itself, and
• The user interface

ECCO (like most software) doesn't let you, the user, work directly with the data - and you wouldn't want to, anyway, unless you're prepared to become a full-time geek. Therefore, ECCO also provides a user interface, a set of tools that we users employ to access and work with the data.

ECCO data = items and folders

Let's assume that you want to organize your ECCO file by organizing the data. When you visualize the data by itself (i.e., divorced from the user interface), there are only two things to consider:

• Items, and
• Folders.

Items are the basic pieces of data that ECCO stores. You enter data into ECCO by creating items. You work with data by manipulating items. You remove data by deleting items.

Folders are how you (and ECCO) organize the items. Items exist in folders. Folders provide the organizational structure of a data-oriented ECCO file.

The data consist of items in folders. Everything else is part of the user interface.

Quick Quiz

What's wrong with this statement: "I'm going to enter this data into my Tasks notepad?" Answer.

Repeat after me!!

This point is crucial, so let's make sure we've got it!

• ECCO data consists of items in folders.
• Everything else is part of the user interface - the tools you use to work with the data.

Let's forget notepads

We're going to concentrate on the data, not on the user interface, and notepads are part of the user interface. So I'd like you to try an experiment: Temporarily forget about notepads. Banish the concept and term "notepad" from your mind.

Don't worry - what you may already know about notepads is not unimportant; later, I'll ask you to "unforget" notepads, and I'll relate them to folders. But for now, try not to think about notepads.

Analogy - ECCO and a paper filing system

Items are pretty simple to understand. They're the basic building blocks of your ECCO data - in fact, they are the data.

Folders aren't quite as self-evident, but the rewards of understanding them can be well worth the effort. One way to get started on the task of understanding folders is to draw an analogy between ECCO and a paper filing system.

In a paper filing system, you have physical folders. The "items" in a paper filing system are the pieces of paper you put into the folders. In ECCO, on the other hand, both the folders and the items are electronic. Nevertheless, there are a lot of similarities between a paper filing system and ECCO!

Putting items into the system

You can put items into folders in a paper filing system, and you can put items into folders in ECCO. Here's how the two processes are similar:

Looking at items in the system

You can look at the contents of folders in a paper filing system, and you can look at the contents of folders in ECCO. Once again, the processes are very much alike:

The item hierarchy

Now all items in a folder need not be equal, either in a paper filing system or in ECCO. You can establish a relationship between items; you can designate that one item "belongs" to another.

For example, in your paper system, you might have a piece of paper on which you've written "Prepare advertising budget." You might have another piece of paper on which you've written a to-do related to the advertising budget-perhaps "Get quote on directory space."

In ECCO, you might have one item, Prepare advertising budget, and a to-do item that relates to the first item: Get quote on directory space.

To show such a relationship, you could create a hierarchical arrangement of items. Here's how you could establish this hierarchy in a paper folder-and how you could do the same thing in an ECCO folder:

Explicit folder items

I've just introduced an important concept - the concept of "an item you have explicitly added to a folder." That concept is so important that it deserves some further elaboration, and it needs a name. Fortunately, it has a name, a name used internally at NetManage but not in any of their current literature. With trepidation for the possible consequences, I'm going to use that name for the concept, and to compound the effrontery of making up a new name, I'm also going to give it an acronym.

An item you explicitly add to a folder is an item that has no parent in that folder. It's the equivalent of the top piece of paper in the paper filing system. That concept bears the name explicit folder item, which I'm going to abbreviate EFI.

An explicit folder item, or EFI, is an item that "belongs" to the folder. A subitem in ECCO of an explicit folder item "belongs" to the EFI, not to the folder. Only EFI's "belong" to a folder. There is, therefore, a hierarchical relationship between an EFI and its subitems.

Opening folders

Now let's return to the procedures outlined earlier for inserting items into paper folders and ECCO folders and for looking at the items contained in those folders.

Notice that one step is identical in all the procedures. To put an item into a folder, whether a paper folder or an ECCO folder, or to take an item out of a folder, you must first open the folder.

How you open the folder depends on whether you're using a paper filing system or using ECCO. Here's how you'd do it in each system:

ECCO views

Step 3 in the last table introduces a new concept: ECCO views. You use ECCO views to look at and work with the items within their folders.

There are three kinds of ECCO views:

• The PhoneBook view, of which you can have only one per file;
• The Calendar view, of which you can have only one per file;
• Notepads, of which you can have (at any given time) 28 per file (25 that you can create yourself plus three that ECCO reserves for its own use - Scratch, Search Results, and Time and Expenses).

ECCO restricts the folders you can put into the first two views.

• Into the PhoneBook view, you can only put the folder named PhoneBook.
• Into the Calendar view, you can only put Date folders.
• There are no restrictions on the folders you can put into notepad views.

Notepads and folders

Earlier, I asked you to temporarily forget notepads. Now it's time to "unforget" notepads and relate them to what we've been talking about - items and folders.

Notepads

A notepad is a tool to let you work with items in ECCO folders. Notepads are simply tools - tools that let you:

• See a graphical representation of the hierarchical way EFI's and subitems are stored within folders.
• Type items into folders, delete items from folders, and edit the text of items within folders.
• Manipulate the hierarchical relationships between EFI's and subitems.

Notepads are not permanent data structures, they're simply tools you use to display the contents of your folder.

To continue the analogy with the paper filing system, notepads are the equivalent of the table on which you lay your open folders.

Folders

Folders are permanent data structures. They're the structures you use to organize your items, just like the manila folders are the "permanent data structures" of your paper filing system.

Tp open a folder to see its items or to change its contents, you bring it into a view. In a view, ECCO represents the items and their relationships as an outline and provides you with a set of outlining tools. In an outline, you represent this EFI/subitem relationship by indenting the subitems under the EFI.

You can use your outlining tools to manipulate items in a folder in these ways:

The Power of ECCO

Let's look at ECCO's most powerful feature - the feature that makes ECCO a uniquely powerful and flexible tool - and see how it relates to the subject of this discourse.

The analogy fails

Take any analogy too far, and it falls apart. My analogy between the paper filing system and ECCO is no exception, because you can do something in ECCO you could never do in a paper filing system:

In ECCO, you can have the same item in more than one folder at the same time.

Note the words same item. In ECCO, you can truly have the same item in one folder at the same time - not a copy, but the same item. That's something you could never do in a paper filing system, and it's the key capability that gives ECCO its power.

Put another way: in ECCO, you can assign an item with all its subitems to as many folders as you want to!

The closest you could come in a paper filing system would be copies of a paper item and its subitems in multiple folders. But we're not talking copies, we're talking the same item. The fact that it's the same item in multiple folders is what gives you the dynamic, simultaneous updating of the item in all its folders that you have in ECCO. Change an item in one folder - the change is immediately reflected in every folder to which the item is assigned, because it is indeed the same item.

This advanced, multi-folder capability means that to see an item in ECCO, you can open any of the folders that contain it. But no matter which folder you choose to open, it's still the same process:

1. Open the ECCO file that contains the folder;
2. Rummage through the folder list to find a folder that contains the item;
3. Open the contents of the selected folder by putting it into a view where ECCO will show you the items of the folder as an outline and allow you to use the outline to add, delete, edit, and change the relationships between the folder's outlines.

Quick Quiz

Assume that you're planning a trip, and you have an item with this item text: "Make airline reservations." You enter the item into your San Francisco Trip folder, which you currently have displayed in a notepad named Upcoming Stuff. You then assign the item to the To-Do's folder, which is displayed in the tickler section of the Calendar. You make the reservation, then in the tickler section you add a subitem ("American Airlines Flight 222") to your "Make airline reservations" item. You then change to the Upcoming Stuff notepad. What will you see - and why? Answer.

Top-Level Items (TLI's)

You'll also see the term top-level item (TLI) in the ECCO literature. A top-level item, technically, is an item that is not a child of any other items. In an outline, it will always appear at the far left. The first edition of this paper used the term TLI in the sense this edition uses the term EFI. Chris Mahnken of NetManage kindly pointed out that if you explicitly assign a subitem to a folder, it's been explicitly added to the folder; but that that still doesn't make it a TLI, because it's still a subitem of another item. A TLI is always, by definition, an EFI (because a TLI, by definition, belongs to every folder to which it's assigned). An EFI may or may not also be a TLI depending on whether or not it has a parent item.

Think folders

The surest road to ECCO success, in my opinion, is to think folders. When you sit down to decide how to structure your ECCO file (or how to change your existing structure), concentrate on answering this question: What folders do I need? After you've answered that question, you can then move on to thinking about how to build the user interface to provide you with the access you need to the folders you've created.

Continuing on ...

Got a good handle on folders? Would it surprise you to learn that columns are really just folders in disguise? If so, you will probably want to continue on with the columns tutorial.