Categories in grids and other suggestions

[prf5]

I can see that there's confusion here about what various people (at least, crcowan and me) are requesting and how our requests are inspired by Lotus Agenda. I'm not requesting the feature that crcowan has identified. I'm not interested in creating a grid of items and category assignments. I'm especially concerned when the moderator's says: "From the different requests we have received, it seems to be a type of data pivot or crosstab of the Info Items where the column headers are Info Item names, and the rows are Info Items that meet a criteria and indicate whether they are parented "related" to the Info Items in the headers. Is that a general synopsis of what is being requested?" For me, the answer is a definite "no." I think that pivot tables are cool, but a pivot table-like capability or a crosstab display is not what I'm interested in, and by the way, that's not how Agenda worked.

Let me devote one paragraph to explaining Agenda, then return to my original request. I think that crcowan has it about right. Here's an example: A hypothetical entry goes, "Lunch with Dave Smith at Scoozi's on Tuesday." This entry might display in Agenda as follows: The item appears in the left-most column (not necessarily, but let's asume it does), then there's an activity column in which the word "lunch" appears, then a person column in which "Dave Smith" appears, then a place column in which "Scoozi's" appears, then a date column in which Tuesday's actual date appears. The assigments can be made either explicitly or implicitly, by means of text-matching. Each of the columnar entries is a category. The categories are related to one another in a hierarchical fashion, governed by the principle of "inheritance." For instance, "Scoozi's" is under "restaurants," which in turn is under "places." By virtue of inheritance, "Scoozi's" is also member of "places."

I'm not interested either in automatic assignment to categories or a matrix-like display -- though others may be asking for that. What interests me is the ability to create views, understood as parts of the database arrayed in the explorer window that meet specific, user-selected, categorical criteria. Example: By now, my explorer window has become populated with old notes and materials that I don't want to throw away but don't want to see every time I open the program. There are various ways to identify these old entries. Using any of them, I'd like to filter them out. Another example: I receive TOC's of new journal issues. I want to create a view that shows only "Social Science and Medicine" and not the other journals. I'm aware that I now am able to filter the database. However, the search results pane does not have the structure that I am looking for, because along with the "Social Science and Medicine" items I want a tree-like view that includes the item's category assignments (for instance, to project A, paper Z, and person X). Similarly, In the "filter out old entries" example, I want to see the entire explorer tree without the entries that have been filtered out.

Paul