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Bulleted lists in Lotus Symphony, what the...

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If IBM wants people to use Symphony, they need to make sure the basics are right.  Today I was putting together a document, and I thought I would try doing it with the productivity editors in Notes (aka Symphony).  First select the Headline style and type my headline, no problem, type an intro paragraph no problem, now comes what should be simple, put in a bulleted list.

No problem, I'll just use the Bullet 1 style, hhm, no bullets, ok let me try bullet 2, hhm no bullets.  OK, let me try navigating the text properties and paragraph properties looking for bullet, eh, no not to be found.  Where are they to be found? Under Numbering, not really obvious.  I checked in MS Word, the menu item is Bullets and Numbering, in Word Pro it's Bullets & Numbers.  When you click Numbering, you still have to select another menu option, which is guess what, Bullets/Numbering.  I also found a toolbar button for bullets, but I had to hit the toolbar dropdown to get that one to appear.

Also why if I have a space, ), full stop or other non alphanumeric characters at the end of a line that is bulleted and I  hit enter, is the next line not bulleted?  This is not how Word does it.

Overall I find the menu structure in Notes 8 very confusing, then when you addin the Symphony menus it becomes even more chaotic. Obviously, this is my personal opinion.  Perhaps with time it will improve, but it's been a couple of months now and I still find it confusing.

Comments

Gravatar Image1 - Carl
If you raise the Context Sensitive toolbar, you'll find on not only the simple bullet icon, but also, at the end of it, one called Numbering and Bullets (Ok, the name is reversed from Word). More importantly, if you have that toolbar displayed, with enuf space to get it all in, you'll find that when you are in bulleted text, a whole pile more icons appear on the toolbar.

Gravatar Image2 - "Also why if I have a space, ), full stop or other non alphanumeric characters at the end of a line that is bulleted and I hit enter, is the next line not bulleted? This is not how Word does it.
"

Heck, this is not how Notes does it either. :)

I have a decent-sized list of issues with Symphony. Overall, I like the premise. But, Lotus needs better QA here before they released it. I will revisit the list with their latest non-Notes (stand-alone) release; I know they have made a lot of changes to tables, for example.

The bullets are quite surprising and quite irksome.

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